Debating German Cultural Identity Since 1989

Debating German Cultural Identity since 1989

Studies in German Literature, Linguistics, and Culture

Debating German Cultural Identity since 1989

Edited by

Anne Fuchs, Kathleen James-Chakraborty, and Linda Shortt

Copyright © 2011 by the Editors and Contributors All Rights Reserved. Except as permitted under current legislation, no part of this work may be photocopied, stored in a retrieval system, published, performed in public, adapted, broadcast, transmitted, recorded, or reproduced in any form or by any means, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. First published 2011 by Camden House Camden House is an imprint of Boydell & Brewer Inc. 668 Mt. Hope Avenue, Rochester, NY 14620, USA www.camden-house.com and of Boydell & Brewer Limited PO Box 9, Woodbridge, Suffolk IP12 3DF, UK www.boydellandbrewer.com ISBN-13: 978-1-57113-486-8 ISBN-10: 1-57113-486-7

This publication is printed on acid-free paper. Printed in the United States of America.

Contents

Introduction Anne Fuchs, Kathleen James-Chakraborty, and Linda Shortt

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Part I. Historical and Sociological Reflections: 1989 and the Rehabilitation of German History 1: 1989 and the Chronological Imagination Peter Fritzsche 2: Unity on Trial: The Mauerschützenprozesse and the East-West Rifts of Unified Germany Pertti Ahonen 3: Apples, Identity, and Memory in Post-1989 Germany Jennifer A. Jordan

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Part II. Architectural and Filmic Mediations: Germany in Transit and the Urban Condition 4: Topographical Turns: Recasting Berlin in Christian Petzold’s Gespenster Andrew J. Webber

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5: Interrupting Unity: The Berlin Wall’s Second Life on Screen — a Transnational Perspective Deniz Göktürk

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6: Beyond the Wall: Reunifying Berlin Kathleen James-Chakraborty

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7: The Rebirth of Historic Dresden Jürgen Paul

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CONTENTS

Part III. Retrospective Reimaginings: The Death and Afterlife of the GDR in Contemporary Literature 8: Labyrinths, Mazes, and Mosaics: Fiction by Christa Wolf, Ingo Schulze, Antje Rávic Strubel, and Jens Sparschuh Elizabeth Boa

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9: Reimagining the West: West Germany, Westalgia, and the Generation of 1978 Linda Shortt

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10: “Dem Sichtbaren war nicht ganz zu trauen”: Poetic Reflections on German Reunification in Angela Krauss and Monika Maron Anja K. Johannsen

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11: Cultural Topography and Emotional Legacies in Durs Grünbein’s Dresden Poetry Anne Fuchs

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12: History from a Bird’s Eye View: Reimagining the Past in Marcel Beyer’s Kaltenburg Aleida Assmann

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Works Cited

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Notes on the Contributors

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Introduction Anne Fuchs, Kathleen James-Chakraborty, and Linda Shortt

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BERLIN WALL on 9 November 1989 and German unification on 3 October of the following year were seismic historical moments. Although they appeared to heal the war-torn history of the twentieth century, unification posed the question of German cultural identity afresh. Politicians, historians, film-makers, architects, writers, and the wider public engaged in a “memory contest” that pitted alternative biographies against one another, prompting challenges to perceived West German hegemony, and posing questions about the possibility of normalizing German history.1 These dynamic debates are the topic of this book. By giving voice to multiple disciplinary as well as geographic and ethnic perspectives, this volume describes the continuing struggle to reimagine Germany as a unified, democratic, and capitalist country. The Berlin Wall may have been largely obliterated, but traces of the challenges to such a present remain inscribed on the physical fabric of the entire country as well as on the memories of many of its inhabitants. By mapping recent German cultural expression across a range of media, the contributions in this volume chart the multiple, and often conflicting, responses to the cataclysmic events of twenty years ago that have characterized the opening chapter of the history of the Berlin Republic. The twentieth anniversary of the fall of the Wall was accompanied by a public celebration at Berlin’s Brandenburg Gate on 9 November 2009. Entitled “Fest der Freiheit” (festival of freedom), it was broadcast across the world, emphasizing the global significance of the events of 1989. The presidents of Russia and France, Dimitry Medvedev and Nicolas Sarkozy, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, and American Secretary of State Hillary Clinton represented the former Allied powers. Interviews with Lech Walesa, the leader of Solidarity in the early 1980s and later President of Poland; Miklos Nemeth, the former Hungarian Prime Minister, who was the first to open his country’s borders with Austria; and ex-Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev acknowledged the massive contribution of eastern Europeans to the collapse of Communism. Berlin schoolchildren and grassroots activists from around the world participated in the celebration by painting one thousand giant dominos, which were placed on the route that the wall had sliced through the very heart of Berlin. These were then HE FALL OF THE

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pushed over in a carnivalesque re-enactment. In this way, the festivities reinforced the illusion of retrospective inevitability alongside the idea of a national homecoming of the German nation in Europe. This volume complicates the sense of unified national identity posited by such spectacles. In contradistinction to the discourse on normalization, we argue that German identity remains fractured along geographical, ethnic, and political fault lines. From the 1980s onward, Chancellor Helmut Kohl aimed to “normalize” Germany’s past by historicizing the Nazi period and placing it in a broader historical context. Kohl’s promotion of conventional patriotism was superseded by the RedGreen coalition government in the late 1990s, which pushed for normalization of a different kind: instead of anchoring German national identity in German ethnicity, the Schröder-led government now recognized the multicultural makeup of contemporary Germany. In the field of foreign policy, Germany’s normalization was further underlined when the parliament voted in favor of the Bundeswehr’s participation in the NATO campaign against Serbia, a step that replaced the constitutional prohibition on non-defensive warfare with a commitment to “multilateralism, international cooperation and the defense of human rights.”2 However, while all these and later policy decisions did indeed signal the end of the postwar period, the notion of normalization remains problematic. Implicitly it posits a standard of normal historical development that makes most of twentieth-century history (not just National Socialism) look abnormal. Furthermore, in the case of recent German history the idea of normalization disguises the hotly contested nature of German identity debates, which continue to undermine easy regression into conventional forms of tradition. In the following we will discuss a range of recent public debates about good governance, citizenship, and German cultural identity. These controversies include the controversial quest for a national unification monument, the equally contested decision to rebuild Berlin’s Schloss, the unexpected protests that erupted over the railway project Stuttgart 21, alongside the continual debate on integration and the legacy of the GDR. Although thematically diverse, these debates reveal the difficulty of creating a sense of shared nationhood. As hot nodes in the discourse on German cultural identity, they reflect issues that resurface in the essays that follow.

Symbols in the Cityscape Attempts to create a unified German political and national identity by rewriting the architectural landscape have been hotly contested, as recent debates about proposed interventions in Berlin and Stuttgart continue to show. Decisions about the built environment have created new national

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symbols, stitched a divided Berlin back together, restored the historic urban fabric of cities throughout the former GDR, and expanded the commercialization of eastern downtowns. Although the break with the immediate past was less abrupt in western Germany, here, too, tensions about which past should take precedence and about the relationship between preservation and economic development have filled newspaper columns and city streets. The inability to reach consensus about what to build upon the wasteland of the site of the former Palast der Republik — arguably Berlin’s, if not Germany’s, most prominent site — demonstrates how difficult it remains to create effective national symbols. The Schloss, the Hohenzollern palace, was badly damaged in the Second World War and was demolished in 1950 at the behest of GDR authorities. Ever since reunification those who saw the Schloss as the linchpin of Berlin’s urban plan and those who believed it to be the symbol of a failed dynasty have argued about whether it should be rebuilt. For more than a decade the debate also encompassed the fate of the Communist-era Palast der Republik, erected on part of the site between 1973 and 1976. Little resolution about the site was reached until the Bundestag agreed in 2003 to demolish the Palast, a process that did not begin until 2006 and was finally completed two years later; the issue of what will replace it remains unresolved. The site adjacent to the Schloss has also become a source of contention. In 2007 the Bundestag decided to give symbolic expression to unification by commissioning a competition for a national unification monument. The parliament specified that this should be erected on the plinth of the former Kaiser-Wilhelm memorial in Berlin that had been toppled by the GDR authorities in 1950 along with the adjacent Schloss. However, when the jury met to evaluate the submissions for a memorial in 2009, it did not deem a single submission of the 532 proposals suitable.3 The time plan according to which the winner should have been announced on the twentieth anniversary of the fall of the Wall had to be scrapped and a new call formulated. A second competition was no more successful. When the results were announced in the fall of 2010 and displayed in a small exhibition in the Martin Gropius museum, the public response was decidedly muted. The decision to recommend three designs but not to award a first prize reflects the obsolescence of national monuments in modern multicultural and increasingly fragmented democracies as well as the impossibility of expecting that such complex and contested themes can necessarily be represented effectively through three-dimensional form. Indeed, such attempts have always been marginal to postwar German art, which may explain why foreigners have for decades designed so many of the country’s most notable civic monuments. At the same time the fact that the lack of enthusiasm crossed political lines exposes a lack of consensus about how to

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represent the Berlin republic as well as about the possibilities of representation itself. Already a century ago Robert Musil satirized the very idea of a national monument: in German, he quipped, there wasn’t even agreement as to whether the plural of the word was “Denkmale” or “Denkmäler.”4 In line with such modern skepticism, the left-oriented tageszeitung rightly argued that the very concept of the national monument had been flawed from the start, since it was supposed to yoke together the ideas of freedom and unity which, in the case of Germany, had followed opposite trajectories from the mid-nineteenth century. Similarly, Die Frankfurter Rundschau highlighted the general perplexity about the function of such a monument.5 Even the conservative Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ) adopted a decidedly ironic tone: it referred to Stephan Balkenhol’s proposed sculpture of an oversized kneeling man as a “gesamtdeutsche Gedenkgermane” (the allGerman Teutonic Man). For the editors of this volume the jury’s recommendation of a male figure (clearly inspired by photographs of Willy Brandt on his knees in Warsaw rather than any event associated with reunification) as a symbol of unity and freedom reflected a worrying degree of gender-blindness and historical forgetfulness: the civic protest movement in the GDR of the late 1980s was driven by both women and men. According to the FAZ, the second recommended design by Milla & Partner and the internationally renowned dance choreographer Sascha Waltz ran the risk of becoming merely a “Spaßmonument” (entertaining monument) because their huge bowl would sway to and fro when people explored inscriptions on the inside. Only Andreas Meck’s submission of a transparent flat roof constructed as a mesh of typographic letters received the paper’s modest praise: “Sein deutsches Flachdach ist kein großer Wurf, aber einer der trifft” (His German flat roof is not a grand design but an honest one). The muted response to the idea of a national monument can be contrasted with the emergence of a new protest culture in 2010 in the relatively conservative western German city of Stuttgart. Here, too, the impetus was a proposed change to the cityscape. Mass demonstrations against Stuttgart 21, the project to build an underground railway station and to raze most of the existing train station, attracted international press attention and considerable support in the rest of the country when police handled protesters with unaccustomed force.6 Although many protestors and commentators focused on the destruction of the environment — hundreds of trees would be cut down as part of the excavations in which railroad tracks were to be buried, and this would in turn create new land for development — the demolition of much of the city’s main train station (designed by Bonatz and Scholer, 1911) was another focus of opposition, as was disagreement about the importance of creating a commercial quarter adjacent to the city center. For much of the century since the building

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of the train station, historians of German architecture had focused their attention upon the work of the avant-garde. However, as in the case of the demolition of New York’s Pennsylvania Station in 1963, the threat to Stuttgart’s main train station prompted serious reappraisals of the value of more academic architecture as well as of civic space over profit-driven development.7 While the protest had been ignited by spiraling costs and geological, logistical, and environmental concerns as well as the treatment of the national heritage, it soon became apparent that the demonstrations gave expression to widespread and deep-seated public disaffection with the topdown model of governance. Precisely because Stuttgart — a place often associated with prosperity and a bourgeois lifestyle that has the reputation of being boring — was such an unlikely arena for civic unrest on the part of either the young or the normally silent majority, it forced the CDU-led government in Baden-Württemberg to eventually replace its policy of confrontational managerialism with a process of mediation.8 For the first time in the history of the state, opinion polls suggested the possibility of defeat for the CDU in the state elections in 2011; indeed, the elections of March 2011 resulted in a change of government. The conflict over Stuttgart 21 highlighted the importance of democratic legitimacy and governance in the face of the increasingly unbridled capitalist speculation of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.

Immigration, Integration, and Social Precariousness The cityscape is not the only arena that has generated controversy about national identity, however. Immigration, integration and, above all, the presence of Islam in German society have become another focal point for vigorous public discussion. The prominence of these issues has been exacerbated by fears on the part of middle-class Germans that their social and economic position is being eroded by globalization. Furthermore, concerns about the unwillingness of a section of Muslim immigrants to integrate into western European society have been a regular feature of the center-right discourse across Europe since the events of 11 September 2001. In summer 2010 the debate over integration heated up once again when the controversial Social Democratic politician Thilo Sarrazin published Deutschland schafft sich ab (Germany is destroying itself, 2010), a book that caused a media spectacle perhaps comparable only to the furor over Goldhagen’s Hitler’s Willing Executioners (1996). Examining the situation of contemporary Germany in a European context, Sarrazin argues that immigration by Muslims has created a range of comparable

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problems across Europe: first, their failure to integrate into the workforce; second, their high dependency on social welfare payments; third, their below-average participation in education; fourth, their above-average fertility; fifth, their spatial segregation with a tendency to form parallel societies; sixth, their increasing tendency to subscribe to traditional or fundamentalist versions of Islam; and finally, their involvement in a high level of crime, ranging from simple street crime to support of terrorism.9 In essence Sarrazin’s book was not directed against immigration as such but against one group in particular: Muslims from Turkey and Arab countries.10 In support of his argument he embedded statistical evidence into a highly speculative genetic argument, according to which intelligence is largely inborn. By deliberately excluding social and cultural processes of inclusion and exclusion, Sarrazin reduced culture to a mere matter of biology and genetic inheritance. In his reductionist view, cultural identity collapses with a crudely biological notion of both a genetic and ethnic essence that determines human behavior.11 Sarrazin’s book appeared in the context of ongoing debates over the place of mosques in the German cityscape. The question has not been whether or not there should be mosques, but about whether they should be visible to their non-Muslim neighbors. Ironically, it has proven easier to erect mosques whose architecture is obviously exotic, such as the neo-Ottoman Merkez mosque dedicated in 2008 in Duisburg-Marxloh, than those dependent upon obviously German precedents, such as the one by the catholic architect Paul Böhm currently under construction in Cologne.12 The newly elected president, Christian Wulff, adopted an integrationist perspective in his unification day speech on 3 October 2010, in which he acknowledged that Islam was a part of contemporary Germany.13 The heated controversy that followed made international headlines when Angela Merkel, the chancellor of the center-right coalition government, declared the German multicultural experiment dead. Prior to Merkel’s comments Horst Seehofer, the leader of the conservative Bavarian CSU and Merkel’s coalition partner, had already fanned the flames further by proclaiming that Germany did not need any immigrants from foreign cultures.14 Like Sarrazin, Seehofer singled out Muslims from Turkey and Arab countries. It is in this context that Merkel adopted an attitude of tactical opportunism by simultaneously agreeing with all sides. Her declaration came only a few months after she had praised the multicultural makeup of the German national football team as a model for the nation and followed her admission that “mosques are becoming a part of our cityscapes.”15 In spite of the polemical, highly contradictory and populist tenor of much of this controversy, it does not indicate a decisive shift to the right: disagreement with Seehofer was voiced not only by the opposition parties

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and the liberal press but even from within the coalition government where the FDP (the Liberals) as well as the CDU Minister for Labor Ursula von der Leyen pointed out the need for more qualified immigrants. From another perspective, however, this controversy is a form of political displacement. The sociologist Heinz Bude argues that social exclusion has become a feature of the modern capitalist society, where the formerly secure middle class finds itself exposed to accelerated and unpredictable processes of economic and social differentiation.16 The socialmarket economy of the old Federal Republic was largely a meritocracy that rewarded personal performance with increased security, higher pay, and social status. Similarly, the GDR made life predictable by rewarding loyalty to the state. In sharp contrast to the relative social security of the pre-1989 era, the new economy prioritizes unbounded flexibility, innovation, and mobility at the expense of vertical loyalty. As Ingo Schulze notes, in 1989–90 West Germany missed a unique opportunity to redefine the relationship of freedom to social security. The globalization of unbridled capitalism therefore polarized society: Im Rausch des Sieges über das “Reich des Bösen” war nur noch von Freiheit die Rede. Diese Freiheit brauchte man, um sich der neuen Märkte zu bemächtigen. Soziale Gerechtigkeit, sofern man überhaupt an sie dachte, sollte sich von selbst einstellen. Markt und Privatisierung würden alles regeln, mit dem Wachstum käme der Segen für alle.17 [Intoxicated by victory over the “realm of evil” the talk was only of freedom. This freedom was required in order to usurp the new markets. Social justice, insofar as this was something thought about at all, should happen by itself. Market and privatization would organize everything; growth would be a blessing for everyone.]

Exposed to a state of permanent precariousness, in which incomes are falling and jobs are increasingly part-time and/or temporary, citizens can no longer be sure that the education of their children or their career choices will safeguard economic security and social status. As Bude comments, the social ladder has become very slippery, and the fall from its rungs, without a soft landing, is increasingly experienced by even the well-trained and well-educated.18 This insecurity has further solidified social divisions, as was confirmed by yet another news story widely covered during 2010, the referendum held in Hamburg on 18 July 2010. In this referendum, proposed school reforms intended to provide broader access for the less privileged to university education were defeated. As many commentators observed, uppermiddle-class parents were extremely reluctant to accept changes that threatened the exclusivity of the Gymnasiums and thus the enormous advantage that the children of university-educated parents currently enjoy in the German school system.19 That this system has been ranked one of

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the least equitable in the industrial world did not deter opponents anxious to protect their own children’s chances of rising to the top of an increasingly competitive job market.

From Ostalgie to Westalgie: Remembering GDR and FRG Cultural reunification did not automatically follow from the founding of the Berlin Republic. Twenty years after unification, many Germans who can remember the events of 1989 still think of themselves as belonging to one half of a formerly divided country. The country continues to struggle with the way in which the pasts of individuals, age and ethnic groups, regions, and two entire societies fit into the new German order. Although most analysis has focused on the former East, there is also substantial nostalgia in the West for what is now often perceived as a simpler, more secure past, as well as interest in specifically Western history, such as that of the political unrest of the late 1960s and the 1970s. The history of the GDR is marked by competing narratives. While historians agree in their evaluation of the GDR as a totalitarian system that had become economically defunct by the 1980s, former East German citizens emphasize the normality of their lives in the GDR.20 The impact of the Wende on East German biographies was tempered by age. Although the fall of the Wall pushed all East German generations back into the biographical starting blocks, the younger generation was often afforded more opportunities to assimilate into the new order than their parents. From the perspective of an older generation that lost their jobs and self-esteem, the question of West German cultural hegemony remains an unresolved issue. For this group 1989 signifies not so much the normalization of history as it does a traumatic rupture in their biographies. According to Martin Sabrow, there are three competing memory discourses about the GDR. The first is the memory of the GDR as a dictatorship. This type of memory dominates the official discourse and public commemorations in the Berlin Republic. Accentuating the repressive role of the SED in all spheres of life, it celebrates the peaceful revolution as the realization of the telos of world history.21 In this perspective there is no question that life in the GDR was repressive and totalitarian. In contrast, the “Arrangementgedächtnis,” the memory of settlement, adopts the perspective of the majority of GDR citizens who often achieved a sense of normality through a range of compromises with the regime. By crossstitching everyday life with the sphere of power, this type of memory refuses to separate individual lives from the political system.22 The third type is perhaps the most delegitimized form of memory: it is the “Fortschrittsgedächtnis,” the memory of progress, that, by remembering

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the GDR from its origins, insists on the idea of a legitimate alternative to capitalism.23 Sabrow’s triangulated model rightly challenges the monolithic perception of the GDR, which is blind to its varied social practices and cultural expressions. Although, as Paul Betts argues, the idea of a private sphere beyond politics was anathema to the state, the relationship of the state to the private sphere was nevertheless complicated. The workplace, unions, youth organizations, schools and the “Hausgemeinschaften” (house communities) controlled social life. In spite of this tight network of control, the domestic sphere remained an arena of “individueller Freiheit, privater Distanziertheit und politischer Dissidenz” (individual freedom, private distance and political dissidence).24 This complicated relationship between the individual and the state requires a new multi-vocal history that investigates life in the GDR from an ethnographically attuned perspective.25 These divisions are clearly shown in literature and film. Since the 1990s there has been a popular increase of Ostalgic works that explore the GDR past from the perspective of individual experience. Creating a space for personal memory, these apolitical narratives counter readings of the GDR purely as a totalitarian state. They have been often accused of romanticizing and idealizing the past, but by dealing with the experience of the everyday, they can, as Anna Saunders has noted, actually promote a more differentiated view of life in the GDR.26 Peter Thompson’s essay on the GDR as an “unheimliche Heimat” (an uncanny Heimat) has cast this discourse on Ostalgia in a whole new light. Until now, Ostalgia was categorized as a transitional phenomenon, that is, as an expression of an inability to “arrive” in the West. Thompson critically engages with this, reframing the nostalgic longing for the East in terms of a retrospective investment in the unrealized socialist utopian promise. Despite the official narrative of continuity, 1989–1990 was also a historic rupture for West Germans, who likewise have been trying to reconcile their West German past with the unified German present. In recent years the process of historicizing the “old” Federal Republic has begun. This can be seen in the belated filmic, literary, and historical assessment of the sociocultural impact and transgenerational effects of 1968 and the period of German terror in contemporary Germany, and in the rediscovery of “other (West) German narratives,” which explore formative moments in the West German story that move away from the Holocaust and the Second World War as identity anchors. Westalgia has emerged as a variety of historical nostalgia that communicates the historical discontent of those who have been left behind by the declining welfare state and a global economic crisis and who therefore fetishize a better past that seemed to promise a very different future. Our volume resists a homogenized cultural interpretation by employing a wide range of disciplines and topics and providing multiple, and

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sometimes contradictory, interpretations of German cultural identity since 1989. In this way it illuminates the diversity of German cultural identities and the plurality of responses that continue to accompany unification. Despite this multiplicity, the volume is characterized by thematic coherence, as the chapters illuminate media- and genre-specific expressions of the changing mental maps of Germany since 1989. The book is divided into three complementary sections that employ discipline-specific filters. The first section, “Historical and Sociological Reflections: 1989 and the Rehabilitation of German History,” consists of three chapters that investigate current expressions of German historical consciousness. Debating the chronological imagination and the idea of historical turning points, Peter Fritzsche’s essay provides an insightful analysis of the different historical narratives produced and redefined by 1989 as an epochal boundary. Fritzsche shows that while 1989 was immediately recognizable as an ending, it remains an epistemological puzzle, “shredding many of the power-political assumptions of the realist school of international politics.” Pertti Ahonen then examines the Mauerschützenprozesse (the trials of East German border guards) with reference to the legacies of division and the prospects of unification in Germany. Outlining the judicial dilemmas and issues, Ahonen’s chapter embeds the trials in the wider debate on German victimhood. This section concludes with Jennifer Jordan’s sociological examination of the intersection of memory, food, and national and personal identity. Treating food as a lieu de mémoire, Jordan’s chapter foregrounds the rediscovery of regionalism in East Germany as a localized strategy that allows the enactment of Heimat sentiments. The second section, “Architectural and Filmic Mediations: Germany in Transit and the Urban Condition,” analyzes alternative geographies of identity in post-unification Germany, ranging from the fractured multicultural topography of Kreuzberg in Berlin to the nostalgic recreation of a Baroque center in Dresden. Andrew Webber offers a further exploration of the link between cultural topography and urban topography. He discusses the tropes of “casting” and “placing” in Christian Petzold’s 2005 film Gespenster, a prime example of a spectral vision of Berlin as haunted capital. Webber shows that the oblique setting of the story that takes place at a barely recognizable Potsdamer Platz and in the nearby Tiergarten resists conventional tour-guide orientations in order to recast these sites in terms of spectral uncertainty. By focusing on the untidy edges of a prime site of the capital of the Berlin Republic, the film also dislodges the consistency of material and symbolic places. Interrogating the recovery of a positive German cultural identity after the fall of the Wall, Deniz Gökturk’s reading of Turkish cinema highlights the need for a transnational articulation of identity that, by contrast to the homogenizing rhetoric of unification, reflects the multicultural makeup of contemporary Germany. In her essay on the architectural rewriting of Berlin since

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1989–1990, Kathleen James-Chakraborty notes that the battle for Berlin is now over. Providing a succinct overview of the debates and disputes that accompanied the erection of some of the architectural showpieces, she examines how architects have been informed by and engaged with Germany’s architectural legacy and heritage. Jürgen Paul completes this section with a chapter on Dresden and the reconstruction of its historic center. While celebrating the reconstruction of the Frauenkirche, Paul admits the impossibility of ever reconstituting the neighborhood around it as anything but a tourist spectacle. The third section, “Retrospective Reimaginings: The Death and Afterlife of the GDR in Contemporary Literature,” highlights the function of literature as a cultural archive that deposits alternative historical visions. Elizabeth Boa opens this section with an essay on how fractured historical experience is mediated through literary form. Concentrating on a wide range of authors including Christa Wolf, Jens Sparschuh, Ingo Schulze, and Ante Rávic Strubel, Boa’s essay explores the period prior to, during, and after unification, tracing how the East German Heimat is constructed through social, geographical, historical, familial and experiential categories, by means of metaphoric motifs and other structural devices. Linda Shortt complements Boa’s reading of East German writers with an analysis on how West Germany is currently being rewritten and reimagined in contemporary German writing in general and in Jochen Schimmang’s Das Beste, was wir hatten (The best we ever had, 2009) in particular. Anja Johannsen’s chapter compares and contrasts Monika Maron’s and Angela Krauss’s respective poetological responses to the fractured and vicarious experience of history. Anne Fuchs’s reading of Durs Grünbein’s poetic cycle Porzellan: Poem vom Untergang meiner Stadt (Porcelain: Poem on the demise of my city, 2005) explores Dresden as a symbolically laden placeholder for German collective and cultural memory since the end of the Second World War. By contrast to his earlier collections Grauzone morgens (Mornings in the gray zone, 1988) and Schädelbasislektion (Basic lessons about skulls, 1991), which represented a city stunted by Soviet influence, Porzellan recovers Dresden as a place of historical redemption that, in the collective imaginary, has managed to transmute the dreadful wreckage of history into a meaningful recovery. Finally, Aleida Assmann’s chapter on Marcel Beyer’s Kaltenburg (2008) explores this as a multilayered text that reconstructs history within both the prism of a family story and the wider framework of natural history. In general, the majority of chapters focus on the transformations of German cultural identity in the new Bundesländer, as it is here that enshrined postwar assumptions about history, ideology, and the future were radically overturned. Although, as we have argued, West Germans too have been exposed to the effects of global acceleration, they did not have to question their biographies and expectations in the same fundamental way.

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Together our authors give voice to the complexity of contemporary German identity and that of the recent past. Anchored in memory contests, which are now as much about the postwar period as the Third Reich, not to mention the even more distant pasts of Hohenzollern Berlin and baroque Dresden, the subjects of their study reveal a nation whose vociferous public debates about the past are crucial to imagining a dizzyingly diverse array of possible futures.

Notes 1

On the notion of memory contests see Anne Fuchs and Mary Cosgrove, “Introduction: Germany’s Memory Contests and the Management of the Past,” in German Memory Contests: The Quest for Identity in Literature, Film and Discourse since 1990, ed. Anne Fuchs, Mary Cosgrove, and Georg Grote, 2nd ed. (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2010), 1–21. While the concept has been developed with reference to the controversies about the National Socialist past, it can be extended to the ongoing debate about the GDR past, which is characterized by a similar affective investment. 2 Stuart Taberner and Paul Cooke, “Introduction,” in German Culture, Politics, and Literature into the Twenty-First Century, ed. Stuart Taberner and Paul Cooke (Rochester, NY: Camden House), 9. 3 See “Kein Entwurf zum Einheitsdenkmal,” Die Zeit, 30 Apr. 2009; “Sogar die Schlümpfe mischen mit,” art: Das Kunstmagazin, 6 May 2009, www.art-magazin. de/szene/18123/einheitsdenkmal_ausstellung. 4 Robert Musil, “Denkmale,” in Robert Musil: Nachlass zu Lebzeiten (Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1962), 63. 5 “Zuviel Harmonie,” tageszeitung, 10 May 2009; “Schaukeln für Deutschland,” Frankfurter Rundschau, 4 Oct. 2010. 6 For examples see “Germany Shocked by ‘Disproportionate’ Police Action in Stuttgart,” Spiegel Online International, 1 Oct. 2010, http://www.spiegel.de/ international/germany/0,1518,720735,00.html; Jürgen Batz, “German Police Hit Protesters with Water Canons,” Washington Post, 30 Sept. 2010, http://www. washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/09/30/ AR2010093003592.html; Derek Scally, “Protest Threatens to Derail Merkel’s Election Plans,” Irish Times, 5 Oct. 2010, http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/world/2010/1005/1224280400563.html; “Polizei-Gewalt bei ‘Stuttgart 21’: Experten geben Politik Schuld am Demo-Debakel,” Spiegel Online, 2 Oct. 2010, http://www.spiegel.de/politik/deutschland/0,1518,720882,00.html. 7 See the anti-Stuttgart 21 website for those who object on architectural grounds; www.hauptbahnhof-stuttgart.eu. An exhibition of Bonatz’s work opened at the Deutsches Architekturmuseum in Frankfurt on 21 Jan. 2011. 8 On the new protest culture, see Barbara Supp, “Die Mutbürger,” Der Spiegel 42 (2010): 42–43. Supp’s essay responded to a contribution by Dirk Kurbjuweit, in

INTRODUCTION



13

which he argued that the opponents represented an ageing population unable to modernize. Dirk Kurbjuweit, “Aufstand der Wutbürger,” Der Spiegel 41 (2010), 26–27. 9 Opposite conclusions can be drawn from the following evidence: the social integration of second- and third-generation immigrants has improved steadily. The educational attainments of children from migrant backgrounds generally exceed that of their parents. Third-generation immigrants often find employment in better jobs than their parents, and a new Turkish middle class has emerged. See Stefan Hradil, Die Sozialstruktur Deutschlands im internationalen Vergleich (Wiesbaden: Westdeutscher Verlag, 2004), 157–58; Hainer Geißler, Die Sozialstruktur Deutschlands: Die gesellschaftliche Entwicklung vor und nach der Vereinigung, 3rd ed. (Wiesbaden: Westdeutscher Verlag, 2002), 282–307. 10 In order to prove that Muslim immigrants posed a threat to the future of German society, Sarrazin compared the high performance of immigrants from Asian countries with the poor achievements of second- and third-generation Turks and Arabs. See Thilo Sarrazin, Deutschland schafft sich ab: Wie wir unser Land aufs Spiel setzen (Munich: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 2010). 11 The tabloid Bild Zeitung published excerpts prior to the book launch. See the opening extract “Will ich Muezzin hören, dann reise ich ins Morgenland,” BildZeitung, 24 Aug. 2010, www.bild.de/BILD/politik/. . ./neues-buch-deutschland-schafft-sich-ab.html. The left-liberal Spiegel dedicated one of its issues to Sarrazin and his hugely polemical argument. See “Volksheld Sarrazzin: Warum so viele Deutsche einem Provokatuer verfallen,” Der Spiegel, 6 Sept. 2010. All the broadsheets and regional papers engaged in this debate. Sarrazin had to step down from the board of management of the Bundesbank. The first edition of 25,000 copies was immediately sold out with a new reprint of 250,000 copies selling extremely well. See “Mit der Methode Sarrazin Bestseller produzieren,” Die Welt, 5 Sept. 2010. 12 See Kathleen James-Chakraborty, “The Debate over the Mosque in Cologne: An Architectural Historian’s Response,” in Crossing Borders: Space beyond Disciplines, ed. Kathleen James-Chakraborty and Sabine Strümper-Krobb (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2011). 13 See “Rede von Bundespräsident Christian Wulff zum 20. Jahrestag der Deutschen Einheit,” 3 Oct. 2010, www.bundespraesident.de/-,2.667040/Redevon-Bundespraesident-Chri.htm. 14 See “Wir wollen nicht zum Welt-Sozialamt werden,” Süddeutsche Zeitung, 16 Oct. 2010. 15 See “Multikulti ist absolut gescheitert,” Frankfurter Rundschau, 16 Oct. 2010; “Das Multikulti Eiapopeia,” taz, 17 Oct. 2010; “Merkel erklärt Multikulti für gescheitert,” Der Spiegel, 16 Oct. 2010; “Merkel: Multikulti ist absolut gescheitert,” Süddeutsche Zeitung, 16 Oct. 2010. Her remarks about the football team were made to the ARD program “Bericht aus Berlin” on 20 June 2010; those about mosques, in an interview with the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung published on 18 Sept. 2010. For critical reflections on multiculturalism see Kanan Malik,

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“Mistaken Identity,” New Humanist 123 (2008): accessed 20 November 2010, http://newhumanist.org.uk/1805; Seyran Ates, Der Multikulti-Irrtum — Wie wir in Deutschland besser zusammenleben können (Berlin: Ullstein, 2007); Radostin Kaloianov, “Multiculturalism and Diversity,” Eurozine (2009), accessed 20 Nov. 2010, http://www.eurozine.com/articles/2009-02-20-kaloianov-en.html. 16 Heinz Bude, Die Ausgeschlossenen: Das Ende vom Traum einer gerechten Gesellschaft (Munich: DTV, 2008). 17 Ingo Schulze, “In der Grube: Über die Zukunft des Kaitalismus,” in Was wollen wir? Essays, Reden, Skizzen (Berlin: Berlin Verlag, 2009), 282. All translations are the authors’ own. 18 Bude, Die Ausgeschlossenen, 33. 19 For a summary of German press reports on the topic see “Nein zur Schulreform in Hamburg,” accessed 11 November 2011, http://www.n-tv.de/politik/pressestimmen/Das-Volk-sich-geraecht-article1090806.html. For the connection between parental education and student achievement see http://www.bmbf.de/de/6459. php, a page that is part of the website of the Bundesministerium für Bildung und Forschung (Ministry for Education and Research), accessed 11 November 2011. 20 According to Timothy Garton Ash, “the history of East Germany increasingly looks like one of those neglected country roads that used once to be a main highway, but is now a slightly mysterious detour running more or less parallel to the motorway.” See “Preface,” in “From Stasiland to Ostalgie: The GDR Twenty Years After,” ed. Karen Leeder, special issue, Oxford German Studies 38, no. 3 (2009): 234. 21 Martin Sabrow, “Die DDR erinnern,” in Erinnerungsorte der DDR, ed. Martin Sabrow (Munich: Beck, 2000), 18. 22 Sabrow, “Die DDR erinnern,” 19. 23 Sabrow, “Die DDR erinnern,” 19–20. 24 Paul Betts, “Alltag und Privatheit,” in Sabrow, Erinnerungsorte der DDR, 320. 25 It is not a coincidence that literature is more attuned to this task than historical discourse. For a multi-vocal collection of short prose see Jana Simon, Frank Rothe, and Wiete Andrasch, eds., Das Buch der Unterschiede: Warum die Einheit keine ist (Berlin: Aufbau, 2000); and Julia Franck, ed., Grenzübergänge: Autoren aus Ost und West erinnern sich (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 2009). Jutta Voigt’s Westbesuch is also an attempt to use short stories and biographical narrative to create a new story of East and West Germany that unites both sides in a dialectic of need. See Voigt, Westbesuch: Vom Leben in den Zeiten der Sehnsucht (Berlin: Aufbau, 2009). 26 Anna Saunders, “‘Normalizing’ the Past: East German Culture and Ostalgie,” in Taberner and Cooke, German Culture, Politics, and Literature, 89–103.

Part I. Historical and Sociological Reflections: 1989 and the Rehabilitation of German History

1: 1989 and the Chronological Imagination Peter Fritzsche

N

INETEEN EIGHTY-NINE was instantly recognizable as an eventful “event,” one that merited inclusion in global-dating systems. It was connected to 1945 to periodize the Cold War, to 1917 to mark off the era of Communism, and to 1914 to frame the “short twentieth century,” characterized by the world wars, the Bolshevik Revolution, and their aftermath, in contrast to the long nineteenth century from 1789 to 1914. The usefulness of “1989” as a date to establish periods indicates the continuing pertinence of dating systems and periodization.1 It confirms the historical nature of two deeply embedded systems that accompanied post–Second World War history: the entire military-industrial complex of the Cold War state in the West, and the Communist block, which was quickly promoted to become the “Second World” and whose otherness testified to its seeming imperishability. The fall of the Berlin Wall on Germany’s “9/11,” a day shared with the November Revolution in 1918, Hitler’s Beer Hall Putsch in 1923, and the pogroms of Kristallnacht (Night of Broken Glass) in 1938, also made it very clear that the end of the Soviet Empire and the division of Europe had come. Indeed, the almost instantaneous recognition of 1989 in the register of periodicity, of the end of an era and the beginning of a new one, contributed decisively to the acceleration and thorough-going nature of the political landslide. In its lengthening shadow, from the initial roundtable agreement on elections in Poland in February 1989 to the fall of the Berlin Wall in November, Communism seemed increasingly anachronistic and obsolescent, even to its own leading statesmen.2 On the fortieth anniversary celebrations of the German Democratic Republic, Gorbachev himself warned the East German leader Erich Honecker that history punishes those who are left behind, urging him to reconcile himself with the revisionist tempo of the times.3 The year 1989 fell into line with the master dating system of the modern West — 1789, 1914, 1945 — which was premised on rupture and thus heralded discontinuity. However, the instant recognition about endings left it unclear what 1989 meant in broader historical terms, why it came about, and what it meant for the future. Contemporaries live in tidy historical periods, with

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1989 anchoring the end of the twentieth century, for example, but are less certain about the ways 1989 has changed notions of history and revalued the other dates with which it is associated: 1945, to mark the end of the post–Second World War era; 1914, to encompass the twentieth century; 1789, to describe the era of revolutionary utopianism; and even 1968, which anticipated the civic commitments of 1989 but also seems diminished by them. This chapter will explore how 1989 anchored and revised the modern chronological imagination and how 1989 both subverted and rehabilitated competing models of historical explanation. The events of 1989 followed in rapid order. Only nine months separated the fall of the Berlin Wall in November from the beginning of Poland’s roundtable talks in the previous February. The pace of events produced two opposite effects. First, surprise: the daisy chain of revolutions was completely unexpected. They were not chaperoned by academic or journalistic predictions. It is worth pondering what this “unexpectedness” really meant. That 1989 coincided with the two-hundredth anniversary of the French Revolution, with Timothy Garton Ash undertaking a journey remarkably similar to that of his fellow Englishman, Arthur Young, who reported on the crisis in France in the late 1780s, provided a further reminder about the basic frailty of seemingly permanent systems, the Soviet Union as much as the Bourbon monarchy.4 The surprise of 1989 recalled the astonishment with which the French Revolution was perceived by both its friends and enemies.5 The watersheds of 1789 and 1989 indicated the historical and basically impermanent, even unstable nature of all social and political constructions. The events of 1989 restored the role of surprise to history and underscored the role of contingency. For example, in East Berlin the breaching of the Wall might not have happened at all if the East German spokesman, Günter Schabowski, had not answered questions from the press in such a confused and vague way.6 At the same time, the extensive scholarly apparatus that in the 1960s and 1970s had sought to explain the stability and durability of the Cold War proved completely unreliable. In retrospect, it served as a kind of rhetorical fortification of détente between the superpowers, but it also upheld the division of Europe. Such assumptions were highly misleading, because they accepted as unmistakable the logic of the Cold War. The second effect of the speed of events was the retrospective illusion of their inevitability; everything seemed to fall into more agreeable place as one revolution spilled over to another from Warsaw to Budapest, and from Berlin to Prague and Bucharest. The fact that the foundations of the Cold War have almost completely disappeared, with few vigorous memories of the logic of détente, of the hair-trigger defense and missile systems, of the deep geopolitical division of the globe and global movements that determined “lines of trade, directions of research, airline routings, . . . systems of weapons,” and of the gnawing fear of nuclear annihilation,

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makes its prior existence before 1989 somewhat unreal.7 It is hard to imagine today, but large pluralities of citizens in the United States and Western Europe believed that they would die an unnatural death in a nuclear holocaust. All this has simply vanished — despite the “war on terror” since September 2001. The year 1989 is also an epistemological puzzle. The European revolutions and the dissolution of the Soviet empire occurred without external pressure or war, shredding many of the power-political assumptions of the realist school of international politics. At the same time, the pressure from below was relatively modest, although it was blown up through media coverage and dramatized by the subsequent politics of remembrance. The number of protestors in Leipzig in October could be counted in thousands and then tens of thousands, no more; the number of petitioners for reform in Czechoslovakia a few weeks later numbered around seventy-five thousand.8 Indeed, in early fall many observers believed that the most likely outcome of the demonstrations in East Germany and elsewhere would be a massacre in which authorities would regain control, as the Chinese had in the wake of the Tiananmen Square protests in May and June 1989. This expectation was premised on the assumption that people power could be countermanded, that it was neither overwhelming nor unassailable. After all, the vibrancy of civil society in eastern Europe was the creation, not the cause, of the revolutions of 1989.9 Moreover, the superpowers were curiously absent, so that the events were pushed forward by small people in small places. The role of personality is unclear: the importance of Secretary General Gorbachev’s refusal to intervene in either Poland or East Germany, which followed logically from his unilateral 1988 renunciation of the Brezhnev Doctrine; President Reagan’s much-heralded June 1987 speech in Berlin, “Tear Down This Wall”; Pope John Paul II’s travels in Poland in 1979 — akin to “Poland’s second baptism” — are all matters of continuing controversy.10 At a certain point, the key players in the politburos lost not so much nerve as faith, which was replaced with a vaguer sense that they were out of step with history. Throughout eastern Europe there was a psychohistorical sense of being out of joint with the times, which itself had enormous political consequences. Without a future, Communism seemed to evaporate. The revolutions of 1989 revised the historical imagination in the ensuing twenty years. First, the speed of events suggested the inherent frailty of Soviet and East European Communism, which had never established enduring anchors in society. The collapse resulted in the exposure of what many observers in eastern Europe and beyond subsequently took to be “real history” rather than the superficial “Communist” kind. This developed into an argument for the “hardness” or enduring constitutive power of culture, cultural identity, and cultural difference. The key theoretical manifesto here is Samuel Huntington’s 1993 Foreign Affairs article, “The

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Clash of Civilizations.”11 Second, the speed of events also fortified the suggestion that the fall of Communism had been inevitable and the superiority of the West and its technological, political, and economic machinery a settled matter. In some versions of this view, 1989 returned Europe to the globalizing and liberalizing trajectory it had followed up to 1914. This was an argument for neo-liberal versatility. The key manifesto for this line of thought could be Francis Fukuyama’s widely misunderstood summer 1989 article in the National Interest, “The End of History?”12 Third, 1989 ushered in a memory boom that stands in contrast to both the ideas of the hardness of culture and the triumph of neo-liberalism. The rapid domino-like collapse of Communist regimes strengthened the argument that the whole political experiment of state socialism had been without adequate foundations and lacked durable legitimacy. Below the surface a real history remained, one that was constituted by half-hidden but enduring national, cultural, and religious identities. In the years after 1989 national and ethnic histories throughout eastern Europe were resacralized, old martyrs reburied, and debates from the 1920s and 1930s revived.13 These extensive national histories were designated as the true, essential markers of identity, and they reestablished connections to pre1945 cultural trajectories, which were sometimes imagined as reaching deep into prehistory, whereas Communism, which was transnational, was regarded as a parenthetical or surface phenomenon. The “hardness of culture” rested on endurance, not change, so that the dominant metaphors of historical interpretation after 1989 were spatial: bounded identities, deep essences, in contrast to surface ideology. The “nation” mattered more than the “people’s republic” which had administered it, and collective memory overrode techniques of design and administration. In this view, culture resists modernity. The emergence of Serbian or Croatian national identity out of Yugoslavia is a characteristic case, but a boom in national history, national memory, and ethnic identification flourished everywhere in post–Cold War Europe. Given 1989, the histories of Hungary, Romania, and Bulgaria before the Second World War suddenly looked much more pertinent and more central to the future. Observers talked about recovery and return.14 The journalist Robert Kaplan established the paradigm with his book Balkan Ghosts, in which he insisted on the ancient and unchanging nature of ethnic identity (and conflict) in the Balkans.15 Indeed, in 1989–90 many Europeans watched the steps toward German unification with the suspicion that national character and thus, in this case, German nationalism “basically doesn’t change.”16 The hardness of culture and the difference of difference that Kaplan argued for in the Balkans Samuel Huntington established for the globe. In his provocative Foreign Affairs article, “The Clash of Civilizations,” Huntington contended that the world was divided into distinct and to some extent mutually antagonistic civilizations (Islam, East

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Asia, Africa, and the “West”). These civilizations had existed for hundreds of years but had found enduring political forms only with the collapse of European imperialism after 1945 and the end of the Cold War after 1989. Despite industrialization, migration to cities, and a global network of trade and migration, civilizations provide the most enduring way of looking at the world. Huntington’s world remains rooted in Herodotus’s Histories with Persia opposing Greece, Islam Christianity, and the East the West. The speed of events in 1989 corresponded to new imaginaries in which cultural depth trumped geopolitical surface. The speedy collapse of Communism also strengthened the argument that the failure of Communism, and the collapse of the Soviet Union and the eastern European satellite states were inevitable given the very process of modernization that Huntington had devalued with respect to culture. In this view, 1989 revealed the basic superiority of Western capitalism and liberalism, particularly in a postindustrial age dominated by information technology. Moreover, liberal observers came to suspect that the essence of European history was to be found in the pre-1914 historical itinerary that would now be taken up again in the form of the embellishment of civil society and the expansion of markets and technology. This restoration of a basically bourgeois history put to rest the failed and violent alternatives of Communism and fascism that had emerged in the interwar period. From this perspective, the fierce ideologies and unforgiving civil wars of the “short” twentieth century from the First World War through to the end of the Cold War looked increasingly aberrant. As Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn argued in his Red Wheel sequence of novels, which portrayed the passing of the world of 1914 into that of 1917, the First World War itself had been folly, with horrific and far-reaching consequences that had never been imagined at the outset. Historians, too, refer to the “ur-catastrophe” of the First World War.17 In this view, European history derailed with the Bolshevik Revolution and the corrosive struggles between Left and Right that followed in the wake of the First World War. Hitler’s doomed wars of imperial conquest provided the extraordinary foundation for the expansion of Communism in Europe for a single, long post-1945 generation. Now, the argument goes, in 1989 history had finally healed itself. Accordingly, the prehistory of the present lies in the period before rather than after 1914. The history of Russia (the field is now renamed Russian, not Soviet studies), for example, and especially an assessment of 1917 and the run-up to 1917 looks completely different, and more contingent, from the vantage point of 1989–1991. Imperial Russia is increasingly seen as a site of social and civic experimentation rather than as a terrain of political decay. One version of the thesis rehabilitating Europe’s pre-1914 trajectory was provided by Francis Fukuyama, who argued somewhat before the fact that the end of the Cold War and the collapse of Communism left the liberal democratic capitalism of the West without a universal ideological

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competitor. The West, or the liberal capitalism the West had refined on a global scale since 1945, was the “last man” standing. History as a dialectical struggle between opposing idea-systems originating out of the French Revolution had come to an end now that capitalism and democracy (in the form of everything from Swedish Social Democracy to American neo-liberalism) had triumphed. The conception had originally been Hegel’s in 1806, when he commented on the seemingly inevitable victory of Napoleon and the democratizing ideas of the French Revolution, but it made more sense in 1989. Fukuyama did not argue that events or wars or economic crises or terrorist attacks would come to an end. What had come to an end was a particular way of imagining open-ended historical transformation: the conception that something fundamentally different from liberal capitalism could pose a universal (and not simply local) challenge and alternative. What had come to an end was the movement of history through a matrix of ideological difference. Fukuyama’s “end of history” is almost the opposite of Huntington’s “clash of civilizations.” According to Fukuyama, culture is pliable enough to assimilate new technological, economic, and political forms, which are highly portable across global borders. As productivity increases, state actors around the world look more and more alike as they work in similar globalized conditions and deploy the same kinds of technocratic and economic tools. In the clash of civilizations, by contrast, culture is hard enough to resist the leveling effects of global flows, establishing the pertinence of difference in the face of assimilating trends. In other words, Persia and Greece remain as existential sovereign entities. Both arguments revolve around how contemporaries evaluate the status of difference and the hardness of culture. Insofar as both theses described how contemporaries themselves theorized what was going on after the fall of the Berlin Wall, neither can be dismissed out of hand. It is not so much a question of whether Huntington or Fukuyama is right, but rather the extent to which they represented broader conceptions of cultural and political change held by various global populations in the last twenty-five years. The conflict in the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s, which stands in for a variety of ethnic conflicts in Europe, should make us careful before dismissing arguments for the hardness of culture. Although conflict was not endemic or rooted in ancient feuds, more and more Yugoslavs thought of themselves as primarily Serb or Croat or Kosovar, mobilized memories on behalf of those identities, and deliberately built up national cultures of commemoration or destroyed competing visions.18 That this memory culture is not, in fact, about particularly old allegiances does not make it less durable in the present. Nonetheless, the hardness of culture is very likely an effect of historical development, rather than essential to the timeless reproduction of modes of behavior, as Huntington insisted. After all, the

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re-sacralization of European national histories in the post-1989 period rested not so much on prior sacred traditions that had been suppressed as it did on the destruction of the multinational empires after 1918, the subsequent assertion of newly claimed ethnic identities, and the cultural homogenization resulting from ethnic cleansing throughout Europe since the 1940s. Dramatically accelerated by the Nazis and the aftermath of the Second World War, ethnic cleansing in eastern Europe was not only the premise for but also the precondition of the strong national identities that were defined in increasingly authentic, exclusive, and even primordial terms.19 The short twentieth-century, with its wars and revolutions, was thus crucial to creating the effect of the long historical existence, the hardness of culture. The circumstances of histoire événementielle facilitated the credibility of the longue durée. Moreover, the durability of cultural and historical divisions, which is a corollary of the hardness of culture, has not been so vexing as one might have imagined after 1989. To read reports on the unification of Europe in the 1990s is to become aware of how the line between the Europe the European Union proposed to construct after the Cold War and the Europe that was to be left out was pushed further and further east. Inclusion rather than exclusion was the governing principle of changing conceptions of the parameters of Europe. Right after 1989 there were many observers who assumed that Western Europe would rebuild all sorts of walls to keep eastern Europeans out; then in the early 1990s, certain “Mitteleuropa” (central European) cousins, first in Hungary, then in Poland, and in the Baltic states, were allowed onto the cognitive map, with experts assuming the “Balkanization” of southeastern Europe. Yet Bulgaria and Romania have been in the European Union since the beginning of 2007. As I write in 2010, Ukraine and Georgia are on the agenda of NATO. In other words, the prognostications regarding cultural differences in Europe have really only been half as bad as expected. Tensions between Germany and Poland, between Poland and Ukraine, between what had been eastern Europe and central Europe have diminished. Beyond Europe, the question of the difference of difference remains salient of course. Moreover, the status of Muslim immigrants and refugees in Europe is uncertain, as is the status of religious fundamentalism more generally. Nonetheless, the last twenty-five years have provided substantial evidence to indicate that the hardness of culture has softened up. Still, one might pause to examine the revival of cultural allegiances in the sturdy regionalisms that have flourished since the Cold War division, although it is not clear how consequential these are. Nation-states and the distinctive identities on which they are based may also be quite useful points of resistance against globalization. They serve as congenial agents for the re-regulation of financial markets and the defense of social welfare systems more generally. The problem of political accountability in transna-

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tional financial crises might revive the conceptual and political utility of the nation state. And what about the other big idea — that history has healed itself, that fractious political struggles and military engagements in the years 1914–45 were an interlude, and that history has reconnected itself to the trajectories of 1914? This argument is not completely persuasive, because it ignores that fact that the entire Social Democratic system of governance is the product of the two world wars and remains the working model for European politics today. Indeed, Social Democracy has become so fundamental in contemporary Europe that it does not need social democratic partisans anymore; even conservative French presidents such as Jacques Chirac and Nicolas Sarkozy define Europe in contrast to the neo-liberalism of the United States. Throughout the “short” twentieth century, large social movements have been active in ways that cannot be explained without reference to the destruction of the old order after 1914. In other words, post-1945 politics in Europe relied more on post-1914 experiences than on pre-1914 trajectories. Moreover, larger global developments, which have seen more and more parts of the world industrialize, achieve a measure of prosperity, and control birth rates, have been accompanied by both more democratization and tighter integration into global financial networks. Since the 1970s, the fortunes of democracy have flourished worldwide. The dream of sovereignty from economic globalization, of “going it alone,” has not worked, as the examples of the Soviet Union, the Third Reich, and Maoist China indicate. The big picture renders a kind of logic to Fukuyama’s argument about liberal democracy and capitalism. Indeed, where are the political alternatives? The whole argument in Europe of what is “left of Left” is a debate about whether Marxism has a future, whether social utopias can be envisioned anymore in the wake of the history of the Third Reich and the Soviet Union, and what might lie beyond Scandinavian Social Democracy. This debate makes credible Fukuyama’s notion of the “last man,” the absence of universal ideological competitors to capitalism. Suspicions about the future of capitalism since the financial crisis in 2008 are completely insubstantial and are not expressed in a Marxist or any other ideological idiom. It is Keynes, not Marx, who is at the center of debate, a debate which is about regulation and counter-cyclical intervention, not capitalism as such. The utter lack of a vigorous political mobilization against basically liberal democratic capitalism is a sign that the entire European revolutionary tradition set in motion by Lenin in 1917 and, indeed, by the Jacobins in 1789, may have come to an end. The debate on what is Left, the diminishing differences between Left and Right or between Social Democracy and Christian Democracy, and the implausibility of utopian thinking and other broadly conceived social constructivist projects indicate that a new kind of political era has come, one in which the basic oppositions of

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continental European politics have lost much of their power. By contrast, the more local, practical heritage of liberal Anglo-Saxon political thought has been revived, but at the expense of the universal ideas of 1789. So the question poses itself: if 1989 makes 1917 look very different, does it also change the assessment of the heritage of 1789? What of the demand to change the world and make new men and women? Broad historical conceptions about the depth of cultural difference and the inevitability of Western liberalism gathered their force from the speed of events in 1989 and of the remarkable, largely peaceful conclusion of the Cold War — with the glaring exception of Yugoslavia. But since the collapse of Communism was also unexpected, despite the easy explanations for its demise today, we should remember how 1989 has also made us forgetful of the decades that preceded. Today, experts indicate that state socialism could not ever have managed the flexible and local technological requirements of a postindustrial economy, but well into the 1970s Communism seemed to work, and Western economists and American spies said so. Moreover, the first stages of the Cold War in the 1950s were characterized by suspicions that the eastern bloc might be able to mobilize state resources more successfully than the West. Both the launch of the Sputnik satellite in 1957 and the erection of the Berlin Wall in 1961 were widely regarded as fundamental failures of the West. 1989 hides the lived contingency of the conflict between East and West. The retrospective flimsiness of the eastern bloc also tends to obscure just how close the world came to nuclear war, how much the avoidance of a “hot war” relied on luck, as recent Cold War historians point out, and how frightened global publics in fact were over the possibility of nuclear annihilation.20 The hotbutton issue of catastrophic military engagement between the superpowers agitated the European public in the most extreme way little more than twenty years ago. Today, the world has a completely different agenda, leaving the pre-1989 world looking strange and misguided, indeed surreal. Yet at the time the Cold War was the very expression of cool, hard, realistic logic.21 Contemporaries have still not grappled with the epistemological ramifications of the impermanence of the permanent. Thinking about the speed and surprise of 1989 makes us aware of history and historicity — not just the transience of a system, or the mortality of a period, but also the internal logic of past systems, which is difficult to conjure up after the past has revealed its pastness. The difficulty of recalling and understanding the past positions and past placements of historical actors is also part of the legacy of 1989, and attention to these dilemmas might enable a more critical view of the subsequent efforts to hold former Communists responsible for their actions. Precisely the speedy nature of 1989 makes us aware of the difficulty of figuring out the relationship between before and after, and how in the period “after” we should hold responsible the protagonists of “before.” This self-consciousness about the

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limits of judgment, augments the lessons of 1989, and it is perhaps more productive than either the arguments for the preexisting hardness of culture or the inevitable strength of Western capitalism. In all sorts of ways 1989 encourages us to take a closer look at historical situations and to make more empathetic judgments, all of which has been a product and a premise of the memory boom in the twenty years since 1989. In the first place, 1989 destroyed certain myths about 1945, and particularly the foundational epic of anti-fascism.22 Anti-Fascism had been an important legitimating support for Communists, but was tarnished by their fall. If the Allied powers were good and the Axis powers bad in 1945, forty years of Communist rule in eastern Europe suggested that the good side could also act like the bad, demanding a new understanding of both categories. Along the way, anti-Fascism had a great deal to conceal: the category was too broad, including many non-resistors and collaborators and failing to recognize the different experiences of victims, especially European Jews. Anti-Fascism also overlooked its own crimes against anti-Communist rivals; the murder of thousands of Serbian Chetniks by Tito partisans after 1945 is a case in point. But the method of unpacking categories also worked the other way, making it possible to come to grips with and to take seriously the small compromises and complicities that marked life in a dictatorship and thus to gain a sense of empathy with the choices available under Communism. Collaboration was an everyday phenomenon in eastern Europe, where repression was broad, unlike Latin America, where it was more delimited, but deeper — and deadlier, as the numbers killed in the Cold War–era campaigns waged by authoritarian regimes against the Left in Guatemala, El Salvador, Chile, and Argentina indicate.23 The historical experiences of Fascism, anti-Fascism, and Communism, once historicized, enable a new attentiveness to one’s own checkered history, which meant that neither perpetrators nor victims were necessarily pure categories: that perpetrators could also be victims, that victim nations such as Poland or Czechoslovakia under Fascism also had legacies of repression under Communism, and that victim nations such as France or the Netherlands could also provide collaborating policemen, as was widely the case in German-occupied Europe. For this reason the Holocaust is now a site of European-wide reflection, and Europeans in general, not just Germans, feel the lingering impact of its moral indictment. The excessive bluntness of a morally absolute historiography has also been exposed in the work of family autobiography, in which both the otherness and the recovered humanity of the wartime generation has been examined by the grandchildren. “The line did not run clearly between ‘them’ and ‘us,’” writes Vaclav Havel, “but through each individual. No one was simply a victim, everyone was in some measure co-responsible.”24 Günter Grass’s 2002 novel Crabwalk is a good example of how layers of

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memory through generations and across the borders of the Cold War and the revolutions of 1989 created very different political positions, and also how the juxtaposition of the layers could produce new insights and understanding.25 The novel featured the generation of the perpetrators; the awkward silences and taboos of the children, the 1968 generation; the new self-identification with the old wartime protagonists, whether Jews or Nazis, by the grandchildren, who jump over across the parents to explore the grandparents; and finally the self-incriminating narrative strategy of the narrator himself. No one perspective is authoritative; each is tendentious and to some extent self-absorbed. Yet the layering of perspectives ultimately creates spaces that produce empathy and block self-pity and selfrighteousness. The events of 1989 broke down polarities of generation as well as party to create new, more manifold, and more tentative historical locations. At the same time, there has been a shift from “big history” to more localized stories, which often feature the difficult work of memory, which has more and more characterized European cultural endeavors.26 Historical work after 1989 is more apt to take place in these grey zones.27 This work is self-reflective rather than triumphalist, mournful but not paralyzed, aware of complicity and compromise and thus wary of absolutist judgment, and it is highly alert to its own epistemological pitfalls. It is pursued in the register of disenchantment in which the idols of heroic history have fallen. History in the gray zone takes as its subject the dispersion and qualification of identities and loyalties; it corresponds to the dispersion as well of opportunities, threats, and dangers in a post–Cold War era. It is perhaps the classic historiography of the “risk society,” in which the individual is forced to do the work of collective imaginaries and be alert to the concealments and complicities of collective history. It takes small steps forward.28 It is an imagination constantly shadowed by disaster, which Nietzsche regarded as the distinctive mark, yet also the great disadvantage, of critical history: while it takes account of suffering it lacks piety and purpose.29

Notes 1

See James Chandler, England in 1819: The Politics of Literary Culture and the Case of Romantic Historicism (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1998); Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century, 1914–1991 (London: Michael Joseph, 1994). 2 Stephen Kotkin, Uncivil Society: 1989 and the Implosion of the Communist Establishment (New York: Modern Library, 2009), 25, 142. See also Susan BuckMorss, “Fashion in Ruins: History after the Cold War,” Radical Philosophy 68 (1994): 10–17.

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Martin McCauley, Russia, America, and the Cold War (London: Longman, 2004), 93. 4 Timothy Garton Ash, Magic Lantern: The Revolution of ’89 Witnessed in Warsaw, Budapest, Berlin, and Prague (London: Vintage, 1993); Arthur Young, Travels during the years 1787, 1788, and 1789: taken more particularly with a view of ascertaining the cultivation, wealth, resources, and national prosperity of the kingdom of France, ed. Miss Betham-Edwards (London: George Bell and Sons, 1909). 5 According to Edmund Burke, the revolution was “the most astonishing that has hitherto happened in the world.” See Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, ed. J. C. D. Clark (Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 2001), 92. 6 For an overview, see Mary Elise Sarotte, 1989: The Struggle to Create Post-Cold War Europe (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 2009). 7 Buck-Morss, “Fashion in Ruins: History after the Cold War,” 11. 8 This point is underscored by Stephen Kotkin, Uncivil Society, xv, 7. 9 See, for example, Kotkin, Uncivil Society, 7, 34; Sarotte, 1989, 19. 10 Kotkin, Uncivil Society, 116. 11 Samuel P. Huntington, “The Clash of Civilizations,” Foreign Affairs 72 (Summer 1993): 22–49. See also Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996). 12 Francis Fukuyama, “The End of History?,” National Interest (Summer 1989): 3–18. See also Fukayama, The End of History and the Last Man (New York: Free Press, 1992). 13 Katherine Verdery, The Political Lives of Dead Bodies (New York: Columbia UP; 1999); Maria Todorova, Bones of Contention: The Living Archive of Vasil Levski and the Making of Bulgaria’s National Hero (Budapest: Central European UP, 2009). 14 Jan-Werner Müller, “Introduction: The Power of Memory, the Memory of Power, and the Power over Memory,” in Memory and Power in Post-War Europe: Studies in the Presence of the Past, ed. Müller (Cambridge. Cambridge UP, 2002), 9. 15 Robert D. Kaplan, Balkan Ghosts: A Journey through History (New York: St. Martin’s, 1993). 16 Jeffrey A. Engel, “1989: An Introduction,” in The Fall of the Berlin Wall: The Revolutionary Legacy of 1989, ed. Engel (New York: St Martin’s, 1989), 3. 17 George F. Kennan, The Decline of Bismarck’s European Order (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1979); Wolfgang J. Mommsen, Die Urkatastrophe Deutschlands: Der Erste Weltkrieg, 1914–1918 (Stuttgart: Klett, 2002). 18 Tim Judah, The Serbs: History, Myth, and the Destruction of Yugoslavia (New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 1997), 15, 65; Roger Cohen, Hearts Grown Brutal: Sagas of Sarajevo (New York: Random House, 1998), xvi; Marcus Tanner, Croatia: A Nation Forged in War (New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 1997). 19 See Tony Judt, Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 (New York: Random House, 2005). 20 See, for example, Melvyn P. Leffler, For the Soul of Mankind: The United States, the Soviet Union, and the Cold War (New York: Hill & Wang, 2007).

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Jan-Werner Müller, “Introduction: The Power of Memory,” 29. Pieter Lagrou, The Legacy of Nazi Occupation: Patriotic Memory and National Recovery in Western Europe, 1945–1965 (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000); JanWerner Müller, Memory and Power. 23 Timothy Garton Ash, “Trials, Purges, and History Lessons: Treating a Difficult Past in Post-Communist Europe,” in Müller, Memory and Power in Post-War Europe,271. See also Tony Judt, “The Past is Another Country: Myth and Memory in Post-war Europe,” in Müller, Memory and Power in Post-war Europe, 157–83. 24 Thus writes Timothy Garton Ash about Vaclav Havel’s post-1989 reflections. See Timothy Garton Ash, “Trials, Purges, and History Lessons,” 271. 25 Günter Grass, Crabwalk, trans. Krishna Winston (New York: Mariner Books, 2004). 26 On this issue see Anne Fuchs, Phantoms of War in Contemporary German Literature, Films, and Discourse: The Politics of Memory, 2nd ed. (2008; repr. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave, 2010); See also Friederike Eigler, Gedächtnis und Geschichte in Generationenromanen seit der Wende (Berlin: Erich Schmidt, 2005). 27 On the notion of the grey zone, see Primo Levi, The Drowned and the Saved, trans. Raymond Rosenthal (New York: Vintage, 1989). 28 See Ulrich Beck, Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity, trans. Mark Ritter (London: Sage, 1992). 29 Friedrich Nietzsche, “On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life,” in Untimely Meditations, ed. Daniel Breazeal (Cambridge: Cambridge UP 1997), 29–123. 22

2: Unity on Trial: The Mauerschützenprozesse and the East-West Rifts of Unified Germany Pertti Ahonen for Germany.1 The “blooming landscapes” that Chancellor Kohl predicted for the former GDR in the summer of 1990 proved slow in coming, as severe economic difficulties and accompanying social and political problems enveloped the region instead. The initial result was an overall sense of discomfort and continuing division in East and West alike, as graphically described by an East German pastor in 1991:

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Now we lie rather heavily in the stomach of the well-nourished and groomed Federal Republic — with our heavy metals, asbestos-palaces, rotted landscapes, kaput cities, Stasi-snares that reach all the way to Bonn, with broken-down, unsellable factories. Now it’s a question of digestion. Cramps are unavoidable. For many it is a gall-bladder attack.2

Some twenty years on, the picture looks much more complex and nuanced. The most acute symptoms of unification-related illnesses have been healed in the intervening years, thanks primarily to slow but steady economic and social improvements in the new Bundesländer. Many former East Germans, particularly members of younger generational cohorts who have thrived personally and professionally since unification, are by now well integrated into the new Germany. But opinion polls and other evidence indicate that significant East-West differences persist in the cultural identities of present-day Germans; a significant proportion of other exEast Germans, especially older and socioeconomically marginalized people, remain disillusioned with their present circumstances and hanker after life under Communism, or at least after certain aspects of that life.3 The stubborn refusal of the post-Communist Linke party to join the SPD and the Greens in backing the former GDR dissident Joachim Gauck as the centerleft candidate in the German presidential election of June 2010 highlighted, yet again, the persistence of important East-West rifts in German public life, more than two decades after unification. As Peter Schneider

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predicted well before the Berlin Wall came tumbling down, the “Wall in the heads” between former East and West Germans has indeed taken much “longer to tear down” than the concrete structure that served as the most visible symbol of Germany’s national partition.4 Most of Germany’s persistent East-West rifts have derived from the legacies of the GDR and the controversies that they — and the varied attempts to address them — provoked in unified Germany, particularly in the first post-unification decade. During that time, conflicts arose in various public arenas. The government’s efforts to resuscitate eastern Germany’s moribund economy with subsidies and transfer payments caused controversy, especially in the former West. Attempts to return some of the private property nationalized under Communist rule to its previous owners proved divisive, particularly as the battle lines were often drawn between allegedly aggressive “Wessis” and beleaguered “Ossis,” reinforcing perceptions among some former East Germans of unification as a hostile Western takeover. Further tensions resulted from the authorities’ efforts to tackle the Stasi’s toxic legacies, as prolonged debates raged on issues ranging from access to secret police documents to the treatment of Stasi employees and collaborators. Even more controversially, the East German system as a whole came under close scrutiny in the 1990s. Two special parliamentary commissions investigated the character of the GDR, including the comparability of the so-called “SED” state with the “Nazi” state, and the resurgence of the totalitarian paradigm for contextualizing the GDR that manifested itself in these investigations generated sustained criticism.5 Partly as a result, a cultural backlash arose in the form of a popular wave of Ostalgie, as many former East Germans, disappointed with their lot in the present, started to view the pre-1989 past through increasingly rose-tinted lenses, reminiscing about positive aspects of the GDR’s everyday life while blending out the oppression that had lurked in the background. This chapter focuses on an additional public arena that assumed central importance in the Berlin Republic’s attempts to come to terms with the GDR’s divisive legacies: the judicial reckoning with the East German system, which unfolded on a wide front, primarily in the 1990s. During that decade, public prosecutors reviewed some 65,000 cases of GDR-era injustice defined as governmentally sanctioned criminality, ranging from various abuses of power to espionage and even doping offenses. The highest levels of public attention — and the most divisive debates — typically resulted from particular kinds of judicial proceedings: those arising from violent incidents at the inter-German border. Although prosecutors examined some 3,000 relevant cases from throughout the GDR, the most closely watched judicial proceedings unfolded in the Berlin region, where 133 charges were brought against 297 defendants because of violence at the Wall.6

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Most of these Berlin area trials targeted so-called Mauerschützen or “wall snipers,” East German border guards who had been involved in killing or wounding people at the Wall. The first such trial opened in Berlin in September 1991 and culminated four months later in the manslaughter convictions of two border guards for the February 1989 shooting of twenty-year-old East German escapee Chris Gueffroy.7 But there was also a series of additional, closely linked court proceedings in which the defendants came from higher up in the GDR’s political and military command chain. They included border-guard officers of varying ranks, ranging from regimental commanders to top-level generals, as well as high-level political leaders. Particular notoriety accrued to two proceedings in which very senior East German political and military leaders were tried for their roles in formulating the policies and orders that culminated in shootings at the border: the National Defense Council trial of 1992–93, which targeted the GDR’s highest governmental body responsible for defense policies, and the first Politburo trial of 1996–97, whose defendants were drawn from the ruling SED party’s top executive. These trials arising out of violence at the Berlin Wall — which, for the purposes of this chapter, I shall collectively call the Mauerschützenprozesse8 — unfolded between the early 1990s and the first few years of the new millennium. They raised — and at least partially answered — a series of fundamental questions about the GDR and its legacies. They fueled public debates and frequently helped to shape the wider political agenda in Germany, particularly during the early to-mid-1990s. They illustrated how continuing East-West tension remained an important obstacle to the forging of national unity and a sense of shared national identity out of the sociopolitical merger effected in October 1990. The trials were highly significant for several reasons. In legal terms, they set two key precedents that had far-reaching implications for the Berlin Republic’s broader efforts to address the GDR’s legacies. The first and most fundamental precedent had to do with how to prosecute representatives of the East German border regime in the first place. There was no clear model for how to proceed in this area, and some fundamental judicial and political questions had to be addressed along the way. Should the actions of the involved GDR officials be measured against relevant East German laws that had been in force at the time, which was what a strict reading of the Unification Treaty and other preexisting German legislation stipulated? Or should the proceedings draw on a higher moral code, known in German jurisprudence as the Radbruch formula, created by the legal philosopher Gustav Radbruch in 1946? According to this precept, judges were to disregard statutory law and defer to a higher conception of justice in cases in which an intolerable conflict existed between the two.9 These questions took on added importance because of their wider political, social, and cultural implications. The Radbruch formula had, of

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course, been formulated and originally applied in an attempt to address the Third Reich’s unprecedented crimes. What consequences would follow from using his precept to evaluate East German governmental criminality? Would the trials be interpreted as politicized victors’ justice, aimed at delegitimizing the entire GDR as a criminal Unrechtsstaat (unjust state) essentially indistinguishable from the Nazi regime? And if so, would such perceptions undermine the transition to a unified Germany by perpetuating old divisions, particularly the persistent Wall in the heads between East and West? After some complicated legal wrangling, featuring pioneering but hotly contested verdicts in individual trials and equally path-breaking and controversial judgments by appeals courts, a compromise formula of sorts was found by the early 1990s. The judicial philosophy that came to prevail in the Wall trials combined a strong base of statutory law with a smaller dose of suprapositive moral principles. The actions of GDR officials were measured primarily against a rather literal reading of contemporary East German statutes, such as the Border Law of 1982 and its precursors.10 On the face of it, the 1982 law in particular set restrictive standards for the use of firearms by East German border guards, although in practice it had been used not to reign in guards but to camouflage the continuation of preexisting procedures, which prioritized the imperative to stop border violations even with ruthless means. But the courts also assumed that GDR officials should in any case have been aware that the shooting of unarmed civilians in the border strip was morally wrong. To follow the argumentation of one particular judge, the “basic rules of humanity” had also applied in the GDR, and, by “examining their consciences,” the functionaries should have realized that the killing of non-violent fleeing refugees had shown “flagrant disrespect for the highest of all legal rights — human life.”11 The second crucial legal precedent established in the Mauerschützenprozesse derived from the first and related to relative responsibility for criminal acts at the GDR’s borders. The underlying question was simple but weighty: who bore the greater responsibility for deadly shootings at the boundary — the frontline guards who had pulled the trigger and caused the physical injuries, or their military and political superiors who had formulated the policies and issued the commands that made such violent incidents possible in the first place? The matter assumed added political urgency because the sequence in which the Wall trials were launched, with numerous frontline guards put in the dock before any of their superiors had to face charges, proved divisive, particularly along the East-West axis. Mutterings about “hanging the small guy” while “letting the big shots run” made the rounds in the spectator galleries of the courthouses and in the press, and a petition against the very first Wall trial launched in the eastern German hometown of one of the defendants was promoted

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partly on the grounds that no guard should be brought to justice until the “big bosses” had been prosecuted first.12 Contrary to some of these popular perceptions, united Germany’s judicial authorities, too, were acutely aware of the need to avoid painting a skewed picture with their actions. In the words of one prosecutor, pressing charges not just against front-line guards but also against “those who had more responsibility and, correspondingly, also bore more guilt” was a matter of urgency.13 Investigations of the involvement of higher-ranking GDR officials in border crimes began in the last months of the East German state and picked up steam after unification, even if the first relevant trial was not launched until November 1992, when proceedings against former members of the GDR’s National Defense Council opened in Berlin. Over the ensuing years there followed a series of additional trials that targeted former members of various relevant East German power centers, ranging from the ruling party’s Politburo down to different stations in the military command hierarchy. As the resulting verdicts — and the appeals court rulings on them — gained public exposure alongside those from the more numerous trials of ordinary border guards, the basic principles for allocating relative responsibility for the crimes of the East German border regime became established. Culpability and punishment were assigned in rough proportion to an individual’s position in the East German command chain. Exceptional cases notwithstanding, office-holders who had formulated the policies and issued the orders that culminated in border killings were judged more harshly than the foot-soldiers who had implemented the orders. Rank-andfile border guards implicated in lethal shootings were typically charged with manslaughter and, if found guilty, sentenced to prison sentences of two years or less. In the vast majority of cases, the sentences were suspended. Higher-ranking officials received more severe punishment, in rough proportion to their respective power positions. Mid-level military officers, such as regimental commanders, were typically sentenced to prison terms of between two and two and a half years — without the benefit of suspended sentences. Those higher up in the GDR’s power hierarchy got more severe punishment, particularly if their role in the running of the border regime had been extensive. Former Defense Minister Heinz Keßler and the GDR’s last top leader Egon Krenz, for example, were convicted of the indirect perpetration of manslaughter and given prison terms of seven and a half and six and a half years respectively. Klaus-Dieter Baumgarten, the last commander-in-chief of the East German border troops, who had cut a strikingly unrepentant figure in the courtroom, was found guilty of manslaughter and sentenced to six and a half years in prison.14 However, there were exceptions to the punitive hierarchy according to which the length of a defendant’s sentence was roughly proportional to the level of influence that he had exercised within the wider

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border system. The longest sentence of all the Mauerschützenprozesse went not to a member of the GDR’s military-political elite but to a front-line border guard who was convicted of murder and sentenced to 10 years in prison for the deliberate, execution-style shooting of a young East German escapee, Walter Kittel, on the outskirts of Berlin in 1965.15 Ultimately, however, the significance of the trials transcended the judicial sphere. At a deeper level, the Mauerschützenprozesse were of far-reaching political, social, and cultural importance as well, particularly in the context of the difficult transition from division to unity that was underway in the Germany of the 1990s. The proceedings highlighted the East-West divisions that made the forging of a united German identity such a challenging enterprise, especially in the early years of the Berlin Republic. In certain ways, the trials extended Cold War battles between the two Germanys into a new and transformed political context. The “Wall in the heads” was evident in the courtrooms, most obviously in the divisive East versus West tone that characterized much of the judicial debate between the defense and the prosecution. The polarized atmosphere was exacerbated by the courtroom presence of a small but vocal group of GDR diehards, particularly in the National Defense Council and the first Politburo trials. Labeled the “fan block” by critical observers,16 these spectators — mostly former East German functionaries — maintained a high profile, applauding their comrades and venting their disapproval of the trials. As a culmination of their protest, they reacted to the verdict in the National Defense Council trial in September 1993 by booing, whistling, and singing the Internationale.17 The conclusion of the first Politburo trial in August 1997 generated even more tumultuous scenes. After the “guilty” verdicts against all the defendants had been announced, an elderly Krenz admirer proclaimed his continued “support” for “Egon”; another waved his fist in defiance; and Krenz himself raised his arms and shouted: “I will not cave in!”18 Beyond such general East-West polarization, the Mauerschützenprozesse also cast new light on specific long-standing East-West disputes. Two issues in particular rose to the fore: the problem of the GDR’s contested legitimacy and sovereignty on the one hand and the closely related discourses of competitive victimhood at the Berlin Wall on the other. The GDR’s legitimacy and sovereignty had been the key issue in the Cold War confrontation between the two Germanys. The East German authorities had relentlessly sought to assert their authority and to upgrade their domestic and international standing, while their counterparts in the Federal Republic had consistently stressed the greater legitimacy and sovereignty of their democratic, Western-oriented polity, even if the precise nature and intensity of these efforts had varied over time. In the altered post–Cold War context, when the issue was no longer the ongoing interGerman struggle but the judgment to be passed on the defunct GDR

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regime and the usefulness of that judgment for the building of post-unification legitimacy and identity in the Berlin Republic, the trials of East German border guards and their superiors produced an intriguing reversal of long-established East and West German stances. The prevailing Western view, as expressed by united Germany’s public prosecutors and echoed in many verdicts, was the opposite of the dominant Cold War line. The very effort to bring East German leaders to justice for crimes committed at the inter-German frontier presupposed that the GDR had been a sovereign political entity, with extensive independence to regulate its own affairs — contrary to previous West German rhetoric about East Berlin’s dependence on Moscow, which was dismissive. The former East German functionaries in the dock also typically contradicted many of their Cold War claims. They now maintained that their state had possessed only very limited sovereignty, at least in matters of external security and border control. The inter-German frontier had been primarily the boundary between opposing military blocs, and East Berlin had been unable to make autonomous decisions about it. The “command center” had lain not in East Germany but in Moscow, and any attempt to alter the border regime would have entailed “the risk of a war.” The fundamental impotence of the GDR’s rulers vis-à-vis their own western frontier had allegedly changed only in autumn 1989, as a growing political “paralysis” in Moscow and the rest of the eastern bloc, combined with the dethroning of Erich Honecker, had enabled the country’s new leaders to exercise their own judgment, which they had done very judiciously, preventing bloodshed, opening the Wall, and paving the way for Germany’s peaceful unification.19 The claims about the powerlessness of East German leaders obviously served exculpatory purposes: decision-makers who had lacked the authority to make decisions could not be held culpable for the consequences of their actions. But the arguments also extended into a new, transformed context; the East German elites’ traditional attempts to discredit their arch rival. By underscoring their presumed impotence vis-à-vis the Soviet Union and blaming any charges against them on an “unrestrained witch-hunt” in the Berlin Republic, unrepentant members of the GDR’s old guard challenged the new polity’s legitimacy.20 Particularly the most hard-line defendants — including Krenz and Baumgarten — kept hammering at these points. They accused united Germany’s authorities of employing judicial proceedings as tools in “a continuation of the Cold War”; of seeking “social revenge” against their former arch rivals; and of trying to “criminalize” East German state and society as a whole.21 In their eyes, the proceedings metamorphosed into show trials through which “the victorious power retaliated against representatives of the defeated power.”22 Such politicized “victors’ justice,” in turn, supposedly exposed the new Berlin Republic as an Unrechtsstaat not worthy of popular allegiance.23

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Rhetorics of competitive victimhood at the inter-German boundary had been central to the legitimacy battles between the Federal Republic and the GDR during the Cold War, and they remained important in postunification courtrooms too. The question of who counted as a victim of the Berlin Wall featured prominently in the trials of East German border guards and their superiors, and the different answers to that question continued to be linked to contrasting judgments of the character and legitimacy of the two political systems that had competed on German soil for four decades — judgments that had significant implications for post-unification Germany as well. During the Cold War, the victims of the Wall prioritized in the West had been the escapees and others killed or wounded in the GDR border strip as a result of East German actions, many of whom had received extensive attention in the Western public sphere, particularly in West Berlin and the Federal Republic, and in some cases considerably further afield as well.24 Unsurprisingly, they constituted the most uncontroversial victim group in post-unification courtrooms too. Their deaths and injuries formed the basis for the charges in the border trials, and the vast majority of the defendants acknowledged the suffering of these victims and their relatives. Most expressed regret, at least in general terms, and some — particularly frontline guards — also offered specific apologies. But residual resistance to such a sweeping acceptance of the Western definition of the Wall’s victims also persisted, particularly among hard-line members of the GDR’s elites. Egon Krenz, for example, suggested that “the FRG had an interest in deaths at the border; it organized such cases.”25 He and others also continued another long-standing GDR practice: the insinuation that the escapees were themselves to blame for their injuries. Krenz made this point mutedly, suggesting that “everyone in the GDR had to know that it was extraordinarily dangerous to enter the border strip.”26 Others struck a more brutal tone, claiming that the escapees had acted in a “suicidal” fashion, “deliberately risking their lives.”27 A particularly unreconstructed former border guard general even fell back on a claim that would have resonated better in a mid-1970s East German barracks than a 1996 Berlin courtroom, asserting that “among the border violators there were many criminal elements that wanted to escape punishment in the GDR and were prepared to shoot their way across the border.”28 A competing, broader definition of the Wall’s victims extended the circle to include frontline GDR border guards. During the Cold War, the East German government had portrayed the Wall as a defensive necessity, erected to preempt aggression from the hostile West. It had also invested heavily in the public commemoration of a particular group of the Wall’s victims: GDR guards killed there in the line of duty, often in unclear circumstances, in connection with East-West escape attempts. It had stylized

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the fallen guards into “hero-victims of the socialist frontier,” exemplary citizens victimized by Western treachery, whose lives and deaths were supposed to provide a model for other East Germans, promoting mobilization and legitimacy-building among the population.29 This East German Cold War narrative as such was largely absent from post-unification courtrooms, except for occasional reminders of the suffering of the “more than twenty dead border guards” and “their relatives,” usually issued by former border guard commanders.30 However, remnants of it lingered on in varied attempts by the defendants and their lawyers to draw attention to the alleged victimization of East German officials. The most prevalent variant, championed primarily by rank-and-file guards and their defense lawyers, highlighted the many hardships endured by ordinary guards. These travails included the physical and psychological strains of everyday service — not least the deliberately imprecise rules of engagement that burdened the guards with deciding what to do in crisis situations — as well as the uncertainty, guilt, and sense of isolation that typically plagued those implicated in shooting incidents, given the secrecy in which the authorities sought to shroud such cases.31 The sustained defense efforts to stress the victim status of rank-and-file guards did enjoy some success. The appeals courts decisions on the first two Mauerschűtzenprozesse, for example, maintained that the convicted guards, too, had been “victims of the circumstances associated with the [inter-German] border” in a certain sense.32 They had occupied a very subordinate position in the military hierarchy, and they had been exposed to particular processes of socialization and indoctrination during their young lives, especially in the East German military. Similar formulations also found their way into numerous other court rulings and into the wider public sphere. Predictably, however, the labeling of border guards as victims also provoked criticism, particularly from relatives of killed escapees, who objected to what they perceived as unjustified blurring of fundamentally different categories.33 Less predictably, some hard-liners among the GDR’s former leaders also occasionally questioned the victim status of ordinary guards. Ex-Defense Minister Keßler, for example, suggested that “over-zealous guards” rather than higher-ranking commanders had been responsible for most Wall shootings, and Egon Krenz maintained that he personally “had never told a border guard to kill anyone.”34 The East German tradition of shunting responsibility for life-and-death decisions down the border command chain thus survived the country’s demise. Ultimately, however, the objective of interventions such as those by Keßler and Krenz was not to deny victim status to border guards as such but rather to blur distinctions among escapees, frontline guards, and their superiors, with the aim of portraying everyone involved as a victim of impersonal circumstances. Krenz helped to set the tone with his repeated

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proclamations about the presumed “powerlessness” of GDR officials caught between “the calculations of the great powers.”35 He and other high-level defendants also employed deliberately vague language, speaking of “victims of the Cold War,” a category that included not only those who had “regrettably” been killed or injured at the inter-German boundary, but also the East German functionaries who had remained “prisoners of German post-war history,” victimized by their inability to break out of the constraints imposed upon them by external conditions.36 In its most extreme form, this paradigm of East German leaders as victims of the Cold War resembled a post-unification extension of the hero-victim narrative constructed around fallen border guards in the GDR. The star figure in this rhetorical construct was none other than East Germany’s last top leader, Egon Krenz. According to his defense lawyers, his actions in autumn 1989 had averted “a bloodbath of inconceivable dimensions.” With his far-sighted behavior in the GDR’s deepest crisis, Krenz had overcome the constraints under which he had previously operated, transforming himself from a victim of the Cold War into a “national hero.” By dethroning Honecker and directing the peaceful opening of the GDR’s borders, he had become a figure “comparable to the men of 20 July 1944,” the anti-Hitler conspirators who had tried — and failed — to assassinate the Führer. In other words, Krenz was an exemplary leader of resistance and liberation who deserved to be revered rather than punished.37 The attempts to portray the East German elites, too, as victims of Cold War circumstances proved largely ineffectual. Admittedly, the sentences in the National Defense Council and Politburo trials conceded that broader forces, such as their misguided Cold War mentalities and the Soviet Union’s background influence, had circumscribed the defendants’ freedom of action. The judges also gave Krenz some credit for his constructive leadership in 1989. But the effort to recast Krenz as a misunderstood herovictim of historic proportions elicited sarcastic snickers from most observers, and the broader narrative of the GDR’s ruling elites as powerless victims was also nearly universally rejected, at least beyond the small Communist fan bloc. The prevailing consensus was instead that the East German leaders bore primary responsibility for the border deaths, any mitigating circumstances notwithstanding. In the words of one judge, they had all been “smaller or bigger wheels” in the machinery of the East German state and therefore essential for the functioning of the system as a whole; “everyone who had issued orders or contributed to their formulation had, from a judicial viewpoint, helped to cause the deaths of [socalled] ‘border violators.’”38 What conclusions can be drawn from the trials of East German border guards and their superiors, then, in the context of German unification and the identity-building needs of the early Berlin Republic? How successful

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and necessary were the trials? What was their broader impact? Did they ultimately facilitate the transition to a new, unified Germany or did they help to perpetuate old divisions, particularly the East-West rifts rooted in the Cold War era? The trials certainly had their problems. Some of the proceedings — particularly those that drew the most public attention, such as the first few trials of individual border guards or the National Defense Council and first Politburo trials — were marred by sensationalism and strife, which gave them the rather undignified appearance of what one critical commentator labeled “judicial theater” (Justiztheater).39 The mass media made a notable contribution to this melodrama. As droves of ambitious reporters vied for the latest scoop, journalistic excesses frequently distracted from the gravity of the judicial deliberations. The tabloids in particular filled their pages not only with salacious tidbits about the trials but also with such confidential details as the addresses of defendants and key witnesses.40 The more serious problems were internal to the courtrooms, however. Much of the trouble centered on the defense lawyers — most of them dour ex-GDR jurists — who often pursued highly inflammatory, divisive tactics, attempting to fuel real and perceived East-West tensions. Their favored instruments of courtroom theatrics were petitions aimed at thwarting and delaying the proceedings, which became a persistent characteristic of the Mauerschützenprozesse from the start of the first relevant trial in September 1991. Some of the efforts were reasonable enough in principle. In the precedent-setting first border guard trial launched in September 1991, for example, the defense challenged the court’s right to try citizens of the former GDR at all; portrayed the proceedings as fundamentally biased because the judge and the jurors all came from the West; and questioned the impartiality of the presiding judge, who had fled from the GDR in the 1950s and subsequently played a role in securing his brother’s release from an East German prison.41 However, the defense typically pushed these appeals to extremes, even after they had been repeatedly dismissed, which contributed to the circus atmosphere that often prevailed in the courtrooms. Many other defense petitions seemed to lack any detectible purpose other than to delay and generally undermine the proceedings. This was true of the repeated defense calls for ending various trials on minor technicalities, which lacked any chance of success. It was even more evident in equally unrealistic proposals for inviting long lists of prominent witnesses, including such potentates as Mikhail Gorbachev. The lowest point of all was reached in December 1991, in the first border guard trial, when one attorney proposed inviting Pope John Paul II to testify on whether UFOs could have been responsible for the shooting of Chris Gueffroy in February 1989 — a step that elicited a formal reprimand from the judge.42

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The problems with the Mauerschützenprozesse were not restricted to the actions of the defense teams, however. Over-zealous prosecutors were also in evidence occasionally, and so were strangely obstinate judges, who managed to drag entire trials to the brink of disrepute. The most glaring example was Hansgeorg Bräutigam, a judge who got dismissed from both the National Defense Council trial and the first Politburo trial for irregularities suggestive of bias or at least poor judgment, including a lecture in which he blamed the SED’s Politburo for the injustices of the GDR’s border system.43 On a more general level, all these issues and others testified to the fact that the Wall trials were highly politicized, intensely contested, and at least potentially very divisive events. This was probably unavoidable in a series of high-profile trials in which former leaders and functionaries of a state that had been peacefully defeated and then absorbed by its erstwhile arch-rival found themselves prosecuted by the judicial authorities of the resulting new polity. On balance, however, the positive contributions of the Mauerschützenprozesse outweighed the negatives. In judicial terms, the trials accomplished a good deal. They demonstrated that many actions in the East German border strip and the orders behind them had been criminal. They linked a range of GDR officials to the border regime’s crimes. They generated standard lines of legal argumentation to prove these points, combining positive law and higher principles of justice. And they established a rough hierarchy of responsibility among the perpetrators. In short, they provided a regulated judicial framework for addressing issues that were widely perceived to have been among the most glaring injustices committed by East German authorities. Even more importantly, the trials ultimately had positive political effects that reached far beyond the purely judicial sphere and facilitated the transition to a new, united Germany. The proceedings belied the claims of “victors’ justice” and the underlying charges of the Berlin Republic’s illegitimacy made by some of the high-ranking defendants, among others. The norms and practices observed before, during, and after the court proceedings were far removed from vindictive political justice. As A. James McAdams has argued, the compassion shown to various ageing and ailing defendants by courts that dismissed the charges against them on health grounds bespoke of a system in which “the value of human life outweighed the public clamour for retribution.”44 The best example of the priority placed on humanitarian considerations was the treatment of Erich Honecker. By the time the GDR’s erstwhile top leader became one of the defendants in the National Defense Council trial in November 1992, he had been diagnosed with incurable cancer. His ability to stand trial therefore became a hotly contested issue, which was resolved strikingly in January 1993, with the suspension of all charges against him. As a result, Honecker was free to join his daughter in Chile, where he eventually died the following year.

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In procedural terms, too, the trials were fundamentally fair and centered on a meticulous examination of each individual’s guilt rather than a blanket condemnation of the GDR. The resulting verdicts hardly reflected a judiciary bent on political retribution. No fewer than 78 of the 297 defendants tried for acts of violence at the Berlin Wall were acquitted, and the sentences given to those convicted were frequently criticized as too light.45 The suspended sentences of twenty-four months or less typically handed out to rank-and-file border guards implicated in deadly shooting incidents often received particular criticism. The father of Michael-Horst Schmidt, for example — a twenty-year-old East Berliner shot at the Wall in December 1986 — vented his frustration with the “fatherly lenience” of the courts.46 Political vindictiveness was even less evident in the subsequent treatment of the convicted GDR dignitaries sentenced to actual prison terms. Practically none served more than two-thirds of their sentence, which placed them on a roughly equal footing with other inmates on good behavior, and many were released halfway through their prison terms, or even earlier. Even Egon Krenz, the largely unrepentant key luminary of the first Politburo trial, regained his freedom in December 2003, having completed just two-thirds of his sentence.47 The accusations of victors’ justice were undermined further by the fact that East Germans were not the only targets of post-unification investigations and trials involving violence at the Wall. A number of Westerners also caught the attention of Berlin’s judicial authorities. Several investigations were launched against police officials and other West Berliners implicated in cross-border shoot-outs, particularly those in which GDR guards had been killed. Most of these proceedings ended at the investigative stage for a variety of reasons, ranging from the demise of defendants to the discovery of falsified East German evidence that rendered any charges unviable. But two of the investigations did yield trials and convictions. In September 1997, a seventy-year-old man received a five-year prison term for two counts of attempted murder because of a 1970 incident in which he had fired repeatedly on an East German border patrol car from the West, narrowly missing the two guards inside. Critics denounced the charges and sentences as excessively harsh — in part because much of the defendant’s youth had been spent in East German prisons — and the trial as a whole was hardly consistent with allegations of retributive victors’ justice against the GDR.48 The other “border guard trials with reversed roles” unfolded between December 1998 and April 1999 against Rudolf Müller, a sixty-eight-yearold former East Berliner who had shot and killed the GDR border guard Reinhold Huhn while smuggling his family to the West in central Berlin in 1962. Müller, who had actively participated in the subsequent Western cover-up campaign that falsely blamed the guard’s death on his GDR

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colleagues, was charged with murder but ultimately convicted of manslaughter. In view of various mitigating circumstances, the judge sentenced him to a suspended one-year prison term.49 Neither the prosecution nor the defense was entirely happy with this outcome, but the trial had at least provided an opportunity to inspect a human tragedy at the Wall from a perspective diametrically opposed to the prevailing norm, underscoring the judicial authorities’ intent to examine the violent legacies of national division in a reasonably balanced fashion. In the broad context of German unification, the Mauerschützenprozesse therefore amounted to a useful step in a complicated process of political, social, and cultural transition. To be sure, they exposed some of the underlying problems of the unification project, particularly persistent rifts and tensions along the East-West axis. But in providing such exposure, they also offered a constructive venue for addressing and at least partially resolving these underlying tensions. The trials were a judicial and political necessity that was managed reasonably well, despite the faults and blemishes that manifested themselves along the way. Without these proceedings and the sense of redress that they helped to provide to some key victims of GDRera injustice, the task of forging national unity in the early Berlin Republic would have been an even more difficult endeavor.

Notes 1

For a more extensive version of many of the points developed here, see Pertti Ahonen, Death at the Berlin Wall (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2011), chapter 8. 2 Friedrich Schorlemmer, cited in Joyce Marie Mushaben, “Rethinking Citizenship and Identity: ‘What It Means to Be German’ since the Fall of the Wall,” German Politics 19 (2010): 79. 3 See, for example, “From Stasiland to Ostalgie: The GDR Twenty Years After,” ed. Karen Leeder, special issue, Oxford German Studies 38, no. 3 (2009); Paul Cooke, Representing East Germany: From Colonization to Nostalgia (Oxford: Berg, 2005). 4 Peter Schneider, The Wall Jumper (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1983), 119. 5 A. James McAdams, Judging the Past in Unified Germany (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2001); Andrew H. Beattie, Playing Politics with History: The Bundestag Inquiries into East Germany (New York: Berghahn, 2008). 6 McAdams, Judging, 1–54; Roman Grafe, Deutsche Gerechtigkeit: Prozesse gegen DDR-Grenzschűtzen und ihre Befehlsgeber (Munich: Siedler, 2004), 15–18; “Die ‘bewaffneten Historiker’ treten ab,” Die Welt, 29 Dec. 2000; Hans-Hermann Hertle, Die Berliner Mauer (Berlin: Links, 2007), 164. 7 Following subsequent appeals and a retrial, only one guard was ultimately convicted.

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For reasons of economy, this usage differs from that in some other relevant literature, in which the term Mauerschützenprozesse is used to refer only to the trials of rank-and-file border guards. 9 Gustav Radbruch, “Gesetzliches Unrecht und űbergesetzliches Recht,” Sűddeutsche Juristenzeitung 1946, 105–8. 10 Gesetzblatt der DDR, 29 Mar. 1982, 201. 11 Landgericht Berlin, sentence against Udo W. and Uwe H., 5 Feb. 1992, Archive of the Generalstaatsanwaltschaft Berlin (hereafter GStB), 2 Js 63/90, Bd. IV. 12 “Werden die ‘Kleinen’ die Sűndenböcke?,” Die Welt, 22 Sept. 1991; “Solidarisierung mit Mauerschützen,” Der Tagesspiegel, 18 Sept. 1991. 13 Heinrich Kintzi, cited in McAdams, Judging, 50. 14 See Ahonen, Death, chapter 8. 15 Hans-Hermann Hertle and Maria Nooke, Die Todesopfer an der Berliner Mauer, 1961–1989 (Berlin: Links, 2009), 201–4. 16 See Grafe, Gerechtigkeit, 24–30, 40. 17 “DDR-Politiker zu Haft verurteilt,” Frankfurter Rundschau (hereafter FR), 17 Sept. 1993. 18 “Sie standen am Anfang der Befehlskette,” Die Welt, 26 Aug. 1997; Grafe, Gerechtigkeit, 241. 19 “Mückenberger und Hager fűhlen sich unschuldig,” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (hereafter FAZ), 16 Feb. 1996; “Krenz macht Moskau für das Grenzregime verantworthlich,” FAZ, 25 Jul. 1997; “Schabowski bekennt moralische Schuld, jedoch keine juristische,” FR, 27 Feb. 1996. 20 Baumgarten, cited in Grafe, Gerechtigkeit, 172. 21 Baumgarten, cited in “Ich, Egon Krenz, bin kein Totschläger,” FAZ, 6 Jun. 1997 and in “Prozess gegen DDR-Generäle fortgesetzt,” FAZ, 4 Nov. 1995; Kurt Hager, cited in “Mückenberger und Hager fühlen sich unschuldig,” FAZ, 16 Feb. 1996. 22 Krenz, cited in “Einer will nicht zum Klub der Unbelehrbaren gehören,” FR, 19 Aug. 1997. 23 “Einer will nicht zum Klub”; Hager, cited in “Mückenberger und Hager fűhlen sich unschuldig.” 24 For more detail, see Ahonen, Death. 25 Krenz, cited in Grafe, Gerechtigkeit, 226. 26 “Ghetto-Rap aus dem Politbüro,” Süddeutsche Zeitung (hereafter SZ), 25 Jul. 1997. 27 Grafe, Gerechtigkeit, 110. 28 Heinz-Ottomar Thieme, 11 Jun. 1996, cited in Grafe, Gerechtigkeit, 142. 29 Ahonen, Death, esp. chapters 3 and 4. 30 Grafe, Gerechtigkeit, 110, 142. 31 “Wer schoss, hatte immer recht,” Deutsches Allgemeines Sonntagsblatt, 18 Oct. 1991; “Mutmassungen über Grenzer,” Die Zeit, 18 Oct. 1991. 32 Bundesgerichtshof, sentence against Udo W. and Uwe H., 3 Nov. 1992, GStB: 2 Js 63/90, Bd. V, 48.

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“Ein mildes Urteil fűr die Werkzeuge des Militärs,” FR, 20 Jan. 1992. “Technokraten des ‘einwandfreien Schussfeldes,’” SZ, 25 May 1991; “Krenz macht Moskau für das Grenzregime verantwortlich.” 35 “Krenz will keine Gnade,” SZ, 19 Aug. 1997. 36 “Prozess gegen DDR-Generäle fortgesetzt,” FAZ, 4 Nov. 1995; “Vorsätzlich zur Tötung beigetragen,” FAZ, 26 Aug. 1995; ‘Schabowski bekennt moralische Schuld, jedoch keine juristische.” 37 “Ohne sie hätte es die Toten nicht gegeben,” SZ, 6 Nov. 1999; Grafe, Gerechtigkeit, 234. 38 Judge Friedrich-Karl Föhrig in his justification of the sentence for six former border-guard generals, 10 Sept. 1996, in Grafe, Gerechtigkeit, 325–27. 39 Dietmar Jochum, Der Politbüro-Prozess: Dokumentation eines Justiztheaters (Kückenshagen, Germany: Scheunen-Verlag, 1996). 40 “Die DDR vor Gericht,” Die Zeit, 21 Jan. 1994. 41 “Zwischen Sühne und Gelehrtenstreit,” Die Welt, 3 Sept. 1991; “Fragen nach Anspannung des Gewissens,” SZ, 3 Sept. 1991; “Grenzdienst ist Gefechtdienst,” Der Spiegel, 11 Nov. 1991. 42 “Kein Rachengel richtet über die Mauerschützen,” FR, 13 Dec. 1991. 43 “Wer ist schuld?,” Die Zeit, 23 Feb. 1996; Grafe, Gerechtigkeit, 28. 44 McAdams, Judging, 45. 45 Hertle, Mauer, 164; Hansgeorg Bräutigam, “Die Toten an der Berliner Mauer und an der innerdeutschen Grenze und die bundesdeutsche Justiz,” Deutschland Archiv 37 (2006): 975. 46 Roman Grafe, “‘Die Politbűro-Beschlüsse waren Bedingungen der tödlichen Schüsse’: Der Prozess gegen sechs Mitglieder des SED-Politbűros,” DeutschlandArchiv 33 (2000): 24; “Sie standen am Anfang der Befehlskette.” 47 Grafe, Gerechtigkeit, 254–55, 257. 48 “Rundum Widerstand,” Der Spiegel, 9 Sept. 1996; “DDR-Grenzer rechneten nicht mit Schüssen,” Berliner Zeitung, 26 Sept. 1997. 49 Staatsanwaltschaft I, Berlin, “Schwurgerichtsanklage” against Rudolf Müller, 27 Jun. 1997, GStB: 540–3/97; Landgericht Berlin, sentence against Rudolf Müller, 22 Apr. 1999, GStB: 540–3/97. 34

3: Apples, Identity, and Memory in Post-1989 Germany Jennifer A. Jordan

O

“Pigs, Potatoes, and Collective Memory,” and was based on several assumptions about the ways that food operates as a lieu de mémoire, or a site of collective memory and identity, in post-1989 Germany.1 After sifting through books, newspaper articles, websites, and cookbooks, however, it quickly became apparent that the word “apples” most certainly belonged in the title as well. That is, apples turned out to be even more resonant than pigs and potatoes, as they were the object of all kinds of memory work in eastern and western Germany alike. From Dresden to Stuttgart, Magdeburg to Hamburg, there are apple identification fairs where people can bring five ripe apples (preferably from the sunny side of the tree) to be identified by volunteer fruit experts. There are municipal orchards harvested by crews of young men doing their civil service, living archives, kept under lock and key, of old-fashioned apple trees, and people busily brewing cider at home, or distilling varietal spirits from specific old-fashioned apples and pears. School groups, college students, retirees, avid members of pomologists’s clubs or fruit-meadow clubs devote their weekends and their backyards to the preservation of old apple and other fruit varieties. These apples both shape and are shaped by memory and identity as people seek to preserve the traditional varieties of particular regions as well as the landscapes they create. Following the approach of scholars such as Applegate, Boa and Palfreyman, Confino, and Lekan, I posit that regional identity, which is focused on the Heimat (loosely, homeplace), is distinct from, but also constituent of, national identity in Germany.2 For Confino, “antagonism and friction reconciled in the end through a process of remembrance and forgetfulness in the Heimat idea as an image of the German locality, region, and nation” (8). Furthermore, “the local peculiarities expressed in, for instance, Heimat museums and images made up through a process of stereotypization a representation of the German nation as a whole” (98). Confino emphasizes that “Germany became a nation of Heimats” because “the idea of Heimat harmonized the heritage of local identities and the single national identity” (158).3 Applegate was a forerunner in seeing RIGINALLY THIS CHAPTER WAS CALLED

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Heimat not only as not inherently proto-fascist (a point emphasized by Lekan, Confino, and Boa as well) but also as a kind of union of the local and the national. She finds that Heimat is simultaneously about the province and the nation. It is precisely the state of being connected to a provincial Heimat that contributes to national German identity. For Lekan Applegate’s research underlines “a decentralized conception of homeland within regional Heimat movements” (7) My work on apples in the first two decades following unification confirms that German national identity happened through, rather than in opposition to, local and regional identities. Although large-scale quasi-industrial agriculture dominated both postwar Germanies and it continues to be the predominant form of agricultural production, it is also being challenged, on the one hand by greater globalization and on the other (and on a smaller scale) by a fascination with local production, including the apples that are the subject of this essay. The civic engagement across Germany after 1989 on behalf of regional apples reveals a growing engagement with the local landscape, history, and community across the East and West alike. Much of this work would have been difficult in the GDR (where many apple varieties were neglected or outright forbidden) and, at least earlier, in the FRG (where property owners were paid to remove tall fruit trees on their property). Apples and orchards after 1989, and especially during the 2000s, have become places where a range of people, from Green party members to local heritage clubs, schoolchildren to retired pomologists, literally produce landscapes as anchors of regional identities that are nested into a broader German identity. Apples and orchards take on some of the qualities assigned to the broader category of Heimat as it developed in the nineteenth century — deeply local or provincial, and simultaneously distinctly German. The care of Swabian or Saxon apples today is also the care of German (as opposed to, say, French or Dutch) apples, even as it is also shaped by less distinctly identity-forming motivations, whether the preservation of global biodiversity or the pursuit of flavor. Food hits home; it is at the heart of personal and national identity and is deeply intertwined with memory. Food operates as a lieu de mémoire in Pierre Nora’s sense, in Germany and elsewhere.4 Much of the work on memory in Germany, and indeed around the world, tends to be concerned either with the shadows and ghosts of violence and war or with heritage and the built environment.5 But food is also a very rich site in which to investigate collective memory and identity, whether of farms and fields, school lunches, or historical kitchen gardens. This kind of memory is simultaneously deeply personal and profoundly rooted in much broader political and economic structures and processes. Elements of agriculture, of a botanical and edible past, undoubtedly contribute to regional and national identity in post-1989 Germany.

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The two decades since the Berlin Wall fell have seen dramatic culinary and agricultural changes in Germany — the nearly overnight disappearance of familiar East German brands, the massive restructuring of agriculture (including globalization) in East and West alike, but also a growing attention to regional specialties, and to local, organic, and seasonal food — the literature refers to the latter phenomenon as the “quality turn.”6 Food can be a lens through which to view German national identity over the last twenty years. But the contours of this connection look very different at different scales. Specifically, when viewed at the national level, the connection between food and memory (especially with regard to the quality turn) appears skewed to the West, as I detail below. But viewed at the literal grassroots, in the orchards and gardens of Germany’s diverse regions, a different picture emerges — of widespread civic engagement in eastern and western Germany alike, and local devotion to particular foods, and to the landscapes they create (and that in turn create them). Orchards, Streuobstwiesen (literally, “scattered fruit meadows”), and backyards become places where people preserve what they see as German or, more frequently, regional apple heritage. Apples themselves, as well as the trees and the landscapes they create, turn out to be deeply connected to shared understandings of the past and future and to collective memory and identity. The initial question guiding this chapter was simply in what way food reflects transformations and continuities in German identity after 1989. Clearly, ideas about identity might be found in typical (or stereotypical) German food, both in cookbooks and in specific products like Berliner Eisbein or Thüringer Bratwurst.7 What is actually eaten on a day-to-day basis in Germany today is fairly heterogeneous and international, heavily influenced by German versions of Turkish and Italian cooking, not to mention Vietnamese, Chinese, Japanese, French, and other culinary traditions. The heterogeneous quality of contemporary food in Germany mirrors the fundamentally heterogeneous and multicultural components of German society more broadly. Those dishes that outsiders often perceive as German are often regional rather than national. Germany as a whole has many distinctly regional culinary recipes, whether Rollmops or Weißwurst, Königsberger Klopse or Kölsch. Food writer Ursula Heinzelmann finds that in fact, there never was a single German cuisine. . . . At the risk of generalizing too much, one could say that the north of Germany is strongly marked by Scandinavian and Celtic influences, the cuisine of the Rhineland has Roman roots, the east carries Slavic undertones, and the cooking of the southwest is clearly Alemannic in character.8

The ethnologist Ulf Matthiesen argues that both eastern and western cuisines have changed dramatically in the postwar years. This phenomenon

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was accompanied (and partially caused) by radical changes in agriculture in both Germanys. Increasing consolidation and mechanization shaped postwar agriculture in both East and West Germany.9 In the East the state collectivized much of the nation’s farming in the 1950s, erasing previous property boundaries in order to create much larger fields of the same crop, working the land with massive combines. The change in the West also promoted larger farms and the use of heavy machinery, but in private hands. Hilly regions like parts of Saxony or Baden-Württemberg were less subjected to the collapsing together of old farms into giant ones, in part because this terrain could not be easily worked with large agricultural machinery. In the immediate postwar years, under Soviet occupation, the large farm structures common east of the Elbe were taken from Junker families and given to smallscale farmers. This turned out to be a less than efficient approach, however. As new farmers often had no farming experience, they quickly abandoned their farms, while in the early 1950s many left for West Germany. In his study of the geography of collectivization in East Germany, Vogeler shows that once the Soviet occupation ended, collectivization began in earnest, resulting in a return to very large farm structures, but this time as Volkseigentum, the people’s property. While there were major structural changes after 1990, the area east of the Elbe continues to be dominated by large farms, which have returned to private ownership. Vogeler illustrates the radical changes in East Germany: before 1990, “200 workers on the Petersberg LPG near Halle . . . harvested sugar beets; after reunification (1994), one worker with new machines did all of the harvesting.”10 The standardization of agriculture in both East and West also had culinary consequences. During the decades following the Second World War, regional cooking and specialties declined in both East and West.11 In the West, Mediterranean cooking became a major trend in the 1970s, preparing the ground for the return of regional specialties and artisanal food in western Germany in the 1980s.12 According to Matthiesen, East Germany experienced an even more significant decline in regional cooking. Certain traditions had been preserved through the end of the Second World War on landed estates, in part because of a reliance on gathering local berries, mushrooms, and greens, something reflected in cookbooks of the day, full of recipes for Sauerampfer (sorrel) and Kress, wild greens that are highly fashionable today.13 Scheffler observes that these things rapidly fell out of favor when times got a little better. They reminded people of hard times and were generally associated with poverty. Central planning and a nationwide standardization in many aspects of daily life, including the serving of meals in workplace canteens, daycare centers, schools, and other institutions, led to the rapid homogenization of much of East German food.14 According to Scheffler, GDR cooking changed even more in the 1950s because of the growing presence of women in the

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workforce. Home cooking became a Sunday activity, since most were eating a warm midday meal in the school or work canteens. However, in spite of increasing standardization, certain distinctly East German regional products remained, such as Spreewälder Gurken and Wernesgrüner beer. New dishes contributed to an East German culinary identity, including “Soljanka,” “Letscho,” “Goldbroiler,” “Röstern,” “Sättigungsbeilagen,” and even a chain of roast chicken restaurants.15 “Sättigungsbeilagen” is a particularly East German concept, referring to side dishes rich in carbohydrates that are meant to fill people up. Scheffler points out that “Sojanka” (a sort of stew, and excellent use of leftovers) and “Letscho” (a savory sauce or side dish based on bell peppers, onions, and paprika) were attempts to internationalize East German cuisine, by bringing in a touch of the exotic (in these cases, Russian or Hungarian) from other eastern bloc countries. “Goldbroiler” were golden roast chickens, and the eponymous dish of the chain of chicken restaurants “Zum Goldbroiler.”16 A distinctively eastern food culture became the focus of considerable longing following unification. To a large degree the eastern products vanished after 1989, although some have been resurrected by websites like Ossi Versand.17 In her study of workplace canteens after 1989, Thelen argues that “food items became a point of interest, this time the quickly disappearing GDR brands. The vanishing of the products and of the tastes that one grew up with was often experienced as a loss of personal and collective identity.”18 The Ostprodukte (products from the GDR) that no longer exist — exemplified by the poignant pickle jar in Wolfgang Becker’s Goodbye Lenin (2003) — invoke a divided Proustian memory of food in the two halves of the country, at times taking the form of Ostalgie.19 Thompson makes the intriguing assertion that “the nostalgia inherent in the term Ostalgie is actually a longing for a future that went missing in the past rather than for a past which never had a future.”20 But this nostalgia was not limited to the experience of the GDR. At the same time this focus on eastern German food, even when it was mass-produced, can also be understood as part of a larger German, and indeed international, interest in localized food culture that increasingly centered on regional memories of longer duration than the division of Germany. Stacks and stacks of books about Thuringian cuisine and Hessian recipes have flooded the market over the last twenty years. There have also been television shows that focus not only on celebrity chefs but also on gourmet journeys (Schlemmerreisen) through German’s distinct regions.21 In the years since the fall of the Wall, much of Europe (and indeed the rest of the world) has experienced a turn toward local, organic, and artisanal foods. Its most codified form comes in the designation and labeling of particular products through the regulations of the European Union on

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the one hand, and the categories created by the international Slow Food movement on the other. Some criticize this trend as elitist, while others herald it as a financial boon to small farmers and as a source for highquality local sourcing. This quality turn, which frequently connects particular foods to longstanding local traditions, intertwined with collective identities and memories, has provided Germans (and people in many other countries as well) with a way of conceptualizing their relationship with the land and its products that is a kind of gastronomical patriotism. Matthiesen refers to this movement in Germany somewhat critically as “the new hype around regional cooking.”22 Stitz and Swoboda also find a “return” to regional foods, writing that in the new states [that is, the East] after the collapse of the GDR regional cooking had to be freed from the musty cooking bred by decades of scarcity on a basis of potatoes, cabbage, canned fish, and pickled cucumbers. Today there are once again homemade Thuringian dumplings, and Leipziger Allerlei [a traditional vegetable-based dish] that doesn’t come out of the deep-freeze or a can.23

The European Union designations are established to identify specific regional specialties across Europe, and fall under three categories: Protected Designation of Origin (PDO) “covers agricultural products and foodstuffs which are produced, processed and prepared in a given geographical area using recognised know-how.” Protected Geographical Indicator (PGI) “covers agricultural products and foodstuffs closely linked to the geographical area. At least one of the stages of production, processing or preparation takes place in the area”; and Traditional Specialty Guaranteed (TSG) “highlights traditional character, either in the composition or means of production.”24 Two of the best-known products under this scheme are Champagne and Parmigiano Reggiano. The system is supposed to protect consumers from being sold champagne that never saw the province of the same name in France, or “parmesan” cheese that has little to do with Italy. The designations are by no means uncontroversial, and the stakes can be very high. As of July 2010, Germany had seventy-two products with indications (nearly two dozen of these are mineral waters, which I omit from the analysis). Of the non-mineral water designations, thirty-six were in western Germany, and ten were in eastern Germany, a striking imbalance.25 A similar imbalance exists in the activities of Slow Food in Germany. As of July 2010 there were thirteen Slow Food convivia in eastern Germany, and sixty-four in western Germany.26 There were three eastern German products in the Slow Food Ark of Taste (products identified for particular protection), and twenty-seven western German products (only one, the Rhönschaf, the sheep from the Rhön area, is listed as both eastern and western). The divide between east and west in the context of Slow

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Food was striking, even accounting for the smaller population of the eastern states. This difference points to a divide relating to income and, probably to a lesser extent, varying tastes, as well as entrepreneurial activism and alliances on behalf of specific products. In east and west alike, PGIs, PDOs, TSPs, and Slow Food are intersections of collective memory and identity with particular landscapes and economies. These designations also anchor traditional foods, often connected to places many people perceive as traditional landscapes, like the Moorschnucken sheep that closely crops the wild herbs of the moors of the western state of Lower Saxony, or the Champagner Bratbirne used for sparkling apple wine in the western region of Württemberg, grown in landscapes of sporadically planted tall pear trees. Many of these products are deeply wrapped up with notions of regional or national identity.27 One of the handful of EU-designated products from eastern Germany is the Spreewälder Gurke, the pickled gherkin, already popular during GDR times, that made the list in 1999. The Spreewälder Gurke is very much bound up in what Heinzelmann describes as “the primeval landscape of forests and swamps [that] extends from the flatlands along the river Spree that flows through the Baruther Usrtrom Valley. Red alders, ash trees, marsh oaks, water lilies, and marsh grasses dominate the region.”28 Another of the eastern products is the Teltower Rübchen, a brassica root (“Rübchen” is translated in varying ways into English — beet, turnip, Swede, root — depending on which variety of brassica it is) that really only grows well in the sandy soil of the eastern German region of Teltow. Specific apples also grow best in particular valleys and on particular hillsides across Germany (and anywhere else that apples grow). It is this identification with a particular landscape, even more than the flavor of individual varieties, that gives the apple such resonance in post-unification discussions of local German identity. When only examining official designations, it appears that there has been far less attention to regional or national culinary tradition in the east than in the west, and that the trend to “heirloom” food so prevalent in much of Western Europe and the United States had largely passed over eastern Germany. At the grassroots level, however, there has been a striking amount of activity on behalf of “alte Sorten” (the German phrase for heirloom or traditional varieties of cultivated fruits and vegetables and agricultural animals), in both eastern and western Germany alike. In the newspaper coverage of this phenomenon, the apple in particular leaps off the page as an object of a massive amount of both physical and symbolic work, the production of material landscapes and of narratives about the culinary past. Pigs and potatoes as well as turnips and strawberries also appeared as culinary lieux de mémoire, but apples and the landscapes they create received a striking amount of attention. Throughout the 1990s and especially the first decade of the new century, local, regional, state, and

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federal projects dedicated to the preservation of heirloom foods in general, and apples and fruit meadows in particular, sprang up across eastern and western Germany alike. Of course this is happening alongside a very different trend: the rise of Aldi, Pennymarkt, Lidl, and the other discount supermarkets in which local, regional, and seasonal products quickly fall by the wayside unless they happen to be cheaper than the other products available. Germans, in east and west, like their counterparts across Europe and North America, have sought to preserve endangered edible plants and animals, but also the kinds of meanings attached to these foods. The fall of the Berlin Wall meant broader access to the edible biodiversity that had been preserved in private gardens and state seed collections.29 Apples, apple trees, and orchards become the objects of intense activity, and sites of identity construction.30 On a biological level, apples are inherently regional, adapted to particular micro-climates, carefully bred over decades or sprouting up by accident in particularly advantageous compost piles. Heimat here is both about place and about the objects that fill places. And trees are unique in their relative immobility, simultaneously part of the landscape and on the landscape. Every apple variety has an elaborate origin story, known or unknown. Some of the varieties making a comeback in Germany date back to the Middle Ages, while others were bred by the official fruit breeding station near Dresden in the 1970s. Cultivated apples are propagated through grafting rather than seeds, and the process of growing new apple trees, not to mention developing new varieties, is long and slow. Apples themselves originated in Kazakhstan and Kirgizstan, where veritable forests of wild apple trees stand at the base of the Tian Shan mountains. Cultivated apples were present in ancient Egypt and ancient Rome, and evidence of wild apples has been found in Neolithic archeological digs in Central Europe. Medieval monks and gentry were active cultivators of apples, but the golden era of European apple cultivation began in the seventeenth century, as fresh fruit became very fashionable at courts from Versailles to Potsdam (ÄV, 43).31 As Thieme and Schneider write in their history of Streuobstwiesen, “the courtly orchard and vegetable garden grew to be a status symbol, and a regular competition for quality, size, varieties and the most exotic fruit began” (S, 38). In the eighteenth century the royal “Lustgärten” or pleasure gardens in Berlin, Potsdam, and nearby Bornim all included fruit trees, and a kind of fruit arms race took place as aristocrats and kings bred ever more exotic fruits in their greenhouses and organeries, and apples were an important part of this conspicuous consumption (ÄV, 32). In the nineteenth century, across Europe fruit breeding shifted from being the domain of the aristocracy to being an increasingly bourgeois activity. “Pomologist” clubs were established, handbooks of fruit cultivation

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were published, and fruit fairs and exhibitions flourished. This work related not only to apples but also all manner of stonefruit, berries, and so forth. In England in the nineteenth century gooseberry societies became wildly popular, spreading across class lines as gardeners competed to produce the largest gooseberry each year.32 The overall goal of much fruitbreeding across Europe, and certainly in different regions of Germany, became less about diversity than particular notions of “excellence,” including high yields, the ability to be stored for long periods of time, and firm flesh. As early as the late nineteenth century, efforts were beginning to limit the number of available apple varieties, a practice that continued into the 1960s in both East and West Germany. In fact most “alte Sorten” were forbidden after 1949 in the GDR and were considered dangerous, as their presence risked interfering with standardized apple production. According to Eckard Brandt, author of several books about apples and one of the most visible apple growers in Germany today, after the Second World War biodiversity [Sortenvielfalt] was declared bioconfusion [Sortenwirrwarr] which need to be eradicated. . . . Thus within a few years, through massive state involvement, the hoped-for variety purification [Sortenbereinigung] succeeded. Remnants of the old biodiversity today are only to be found in run-down fruit meadows, in old private gardens, and scattered along roadsides. In order to at least preserve these few remnants and to work against their disappearance, a Pomologists’ club once again established itself in Germany.33

While some efforts to save old varieties failed in the GDR before 1989, in the 1980s attempts at preservation were made in Dresden, and certainly some varieties survived in private gardens and orchards. Most apple production in the GDR happened on carefully planted collective Plantagen (plantations) and relied on a narrow range of varieties known for their high yields. According to Heilmeyer and Wimmer, “after 1990 the collectives came apart, and countless fruit plantations were felled. Fruit imports flooded the market. Within a short time, fruit production was in a sorry state” (ÄV, 77). This change also helps to set the stage for the engagement with Alte Sorten. Especially over the last ten years, heirloom apples have experienced a remarkable comeback — if not in supermarkets, then at least in private gardens, archival orchards, and regional projects. Today there are six hundred varieties of apples grown in Brandenburg alone, and an estimated one thousand in all of Germany, with particularly extensive collections in Potsdam’s Bornim, in the Kolonie Alexandrowka in Potsdam, and in Müncheberg, where fruit research has been conducted in Brandenburg since 1928 (ÄV, 78). Alexandrowka was actually planted by Peter Joseph Lenné in 1828, and there are still a few venerable old apple trees left from

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the original planting. Müncheberg was the site of the development of many of the new GDR apple varieties, such as Alkmene, Auralia, Carola, and Helios (ÄV, 91). This resurgence has happened primarily at the grassroots level, as a handful of national groups and dozens of local or regional groups set out to track down forgotten apple trees, distribute saplings, and plant community orchards. These groups attach specific meanings to these apples and orchards, often combining attention to the future (preserving biodiversity) with stewardship of the past. This past is sometimes referred to in national terms (“alte deutsche Apfelsorten”), but quite often in local and regional terms as well (“Märkische Äpfel,” “Äpfel des Alten Lands,” or describing apple wine as the “Swabian national drink.”34 As Germans grappled with unification and its consequences, many people found their way into orchards big and small. Tiny preservation projects, ambitious ecologically motivated Streuobstwiesen, and government gene banks have emerged over the past twenty years in East and West alike. Newspaper articles describe the efforts to plant new fruit meadows as “a piece of Heimat returning,” or “protecting cultural landscapes.”35 In fact, many of these apples and apple landscapes are relatively new. Apple cultivation in Brandenburg did not really take off until the nineteenth century, and many of today’s heirloom varieties resulted from the fruitbreeding enthusiasm that swept Europe in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (cf. ÄV). Indeed many of the apples traditionally cultivated in Germany today were first bred in France, England, the Netherlands, and even Canada and the United States a century or two ago.36 Over time farmers and gardeners discovered what varieties grow best in their particular area, creating apples that are often uniquely suited to particular microclimates (such as Baden-Württemberg or Sachsen, Havelland or Altes Land). But even as they are very regional, the importance of German as opposed to French, English, Dutch, or North American apples is also striking. The apple literature and apple growers maintain strict national categories of apples, whenever possible identifying the country in which a particular apple was developed, so that in books of “deutsche Apfelsorten” (German apple varieties), plenty of Dutch, French, English, and American apples make appearances as well.37 The book Deutschlands Obstsorten (Germany’s Fruit Varieties), published in the early twentieth century, reveals some of the complexity of a “German” apple. The apples listed as as “Germany’s apples” include plenty of varieties originally bred in other countries, like the Pineapple Renette from Holland, or the Baumann’s Renette developed in Alsace in 1800. The Golden Renette Freiherr von Berlepsch, on the other hand, a golden, striped apple, was developed in the Rhineland.38 At the same time, while journalists, chefs, and apple aficionados distinguish between apples from the Altes Land near Hamburg or the Prignitz, the Rheinland, or Swabia, all of these

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apples are also clearly understood as German, in opposition to Dutch, English, French, or North American apples.39 Across Germany, especially in the fall, hundreds of people bring their apples to fairs and festivals to be identified by volunteer apple experts, armed with century-old botanical prints and wax models.40 At one apple identification day in Halle, experts identified seventy-three apple varieties and sixteen pear varieties. More than half of the varieties were more than a century old, some dating as far back as 1700, like the Goldparmäne, or 1600, like the Rote Eiserapfel.41 Lectures, presentations, and exhibitions are held in association with all these projects.42 The flurry of activity around apples reveals the ways that individual citizens in the former East actively participate in placemaking projects of civil society at federal, regional, and local levels, whether they are hobby gardeners in a local club or high-tech plant geneticists. There are many groups dedicated to the preservation of old apples, but also that of other fruits, vegetables, and animals.43 These include nationwide organizations such as Slow Food or VEN, the Verein zur Erhaltung der Nutzpflanzenvielfalt,44 or regional groups, many of them located in the East, such as VERN (Verein zur Erhaltung und Rekultivierung von Nutzpflanzen), which has eighteen different seed-saving gardens across Berlin and Brandenburg.45 There is also the Leibniz-Institut Pflanzengenetik und Kulturpflanzenforschung (IPK) in Gatersleben in Sachsen-Anhalt, and a show garden in the Uckermark that began in 1996.46 The Naturschutzbund Deutschland is another key player, with hundreds of local chapters and projects.47 “Streuobst” is one of twenty central themes on which NABU focuses. The Deutsche Pomologen-Verein, founded in 1991 as the heir to previous pomologists clubs, has members in east and west, and is a key source of apple memory. They assert that “fruit varieties are a living cultural heritage that must be preserved for the security of our future.”48 Their simultaneous attention to the future and the past echoes the motivation of many similar projects. State governments get involved, funding or spearheading projects through their environmental and other offices. At the same time, the importance of local and even private initiatives cannot be overestimated. Indeed, an appreciation for the literal rootedness of apples offers a small-scale way for the market economy to penetrate the former East. In Frankfurt an der Oder, in the former East Germany, there is an apple show garden, run by Thomas Bröcker and Claudia Schernus. As one newspaper reports, little trees stand side by side with apples that you can’t find in any store. Many varieties might have disappeared entirely if Claudia Schernus and Thomas Bröcker hadn’t combed through the fruit-treelined roads, villages, and farmers’ gardens in the area. When they found something, they cut off a sprig and “planted” it on standard

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apple rootstock. One hundred and fifty varieties thrive in their oneof-a-kind collection in Frankfurt (Oder).49

Even before 1989 Bröcker was already working together with the Frankfurt (Oder) Baumschule, training apprentices for the VEG Obstproduktion Frankfurt-Markendorf by using old apple trees. “After the end of the GDR the garden [of the VEG Obstproduktion] went to seed, and Bröcker transplanted the trees that no longer interested anyone.”50 They have now established an Apple Gallery in Schöneberg in Berlin that sells apples and other fruit from the Obsthof Schernus and Bröcker in Frankfurt (Oder). A distinctive form of apple preservation closely tied to the larger landscape is the Streuobstwiese.51 The website of NABU, the Naturschutzbund (Environmental Protection Union), describes Streuobstwiesen as “generally a meadow mown once or twice a year, with a loose planting of standard-sized fruit trees; endangered, very species-rich, half-natural living space in the cultural landscapes near villages.”52 These can be idyllic sites with layers of vegetation, buzzing with bees, full of birds and unseen mammals. They are chaotic spaces in comparison to the regimented order of commercial fruit plantiations, where the trees are kept very low to ease harvesting, and the ground largely bare. They are often (but not always) used for cider rather than as dessert apples. The preservation of Streuobstwiesen involves an attention not only to biodiversity but also to the meadows in which these apples are traditionally grown. These trees line the drives up to farmhouses or are planted in long rows at the edges of fields and property lines, or scattered across meadows and backyards. Thus the preservation of particular genotypes, flavors, textures, and colors in this case also entails the preservation or restoration of particular uses of the land and the resultant ecosystems. In many of the descriptions, the biodiversity of Streuobstwiesen can be a metaphor for deeply rooted, traditional places — but also for a Garden of Eden, with everybody welcome, free to come and go as they please, the trees well cared for but the ground full of weeds and wildflowers, the air full of birds, bees, and other insects. On an old Streuobstwiese, a venerable old tree might be knocked over in a storm and replaced by a sapling, so that over the decades a Streuobstwiese can become home to trees of widely varying sizes and ages. They are well suited for grazing and hay making, and usually contain old and robust varieties that do not need fertilizer or pesticide (S, 8). Many of the projects aimed at preserving them focus just as much on the ecosystem around them as on the fruit itself. The fruits of these meadows, often rock-hard pears and shockingly sour apples, can then be turned into earthy cider or hard spirits.53 Streuobstwiesen clearly suffered a decline in both East and West Germany in the twentieth century, in part because of changing systems of food production and distribution — in many cases it became more time-

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consuming to produce one’s own food and drink on the farm. Changes in urban, suburban, and rural development also had dramatic consequences for Streuobstwiesen. Many villages across Germany were surrounded by a ring of these fruit meadows, which provided easy access to the fruit, and a bit of a buffer to winds and surrounding agricultural land. As villages, suburbs, and road construction expanded in the second half of the twentieth century, the fruit meadows began to give way to roads and housing. In 1953, West Germany decided that “there is no longer any place for Hoch- and Halbstämme. Scattered fruit tree planting, planting fruit trees along roadsides, and Mischkultur [the mixing of different types of fruit trees] are to be abandoned,” and premiums were paid for the felling of tall fruit trees through the mid-1970s (S, 45). There was also a systematic process of “Flurbereinigung” in both East and West Germany in the 1960s, combining what had once been individual strips or squares of private property into larger fields (generally privately owned in West Germany, and collectivized in East Germany). These were two very different approaches to changing agricultural land use, but both required felling the tall fruit trees that were often planted along the edges of fields and property lines. Streuobstwiesen have persisted more successfully in southern than in northern Germany, in part because hilly landscapes lend themselves to preservation (S, 8, 11, 30). Like apple growing more generally, a “return” to Streuobstwiesen is often understood as a way of transforming local economies. For some the care of Streuobstwiesen is a hobby and even a calling; for others it can be a successful niche market. Growing heirloom varieties has offered small farmers one way to respond to the growing interest in old-fashioned or rare foods and to the growing difficulty of competing with large-scale agriculture. The rejuvenation of existing fruit meadows and the planting of new ones can also be very much community activities. Village mayors show up to plant trees, local residents become sponsors of particular trees or meadows, and people even donate land to communal fruit meadows. As with the table apples, a lot of this work happens in the context of Vereine, a particularly German institution of civic clubs organized around everything from environmental protection to volleyball and folk costumes. Efforts to make the Streuobstwiesen profitable include the founding of the Dresdner Spezialitätenbrennerei in 2001 in the southeast corner of the former GDR.54 The distillery tracked down varieties in the surrounding landscape that were no longer commercially viable, and started turning them into spirits. For example, “with the help of a pomologist [they] found a Streuobstwiese with a cluster of ‘Bohemian Rose apple’ trees, an apple that had been thought to be extinct.” Their “goal is to find and preserve varieties that are no longer exploited agriculturally, and to turn them into premium spirits.”55 They even turn old quince trees, truly not known for being a cash crop, into a source of lucrative spirits. These

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forgotten apple trees and their landscapes thus get transformed and distilled into a consumable product. Through apples, people eat the past and plant the future in contexts that can be eminently local, in backyards and village greens, or completely globalized in international ports and the transnational market for year-round apples. Through apples, Germans from both east and west alike have discovered over the course of the last twenty years a means of crafting identities in a local, grassroots, and regional way, producing through civic engagement landscapes where region and nation seem to be mutually constitutive rather than antithetical. Through apples, the same Gemans have participated in an international turn toward quality in local food production, driven in part by the transnational marketing of places and products. These paradoxes have nurtured the construction of identities at once specific and flexible, civic and market-driven, as citizens in both halves of the reunified country produce and consume these edible landscapes of memory.

Notes 1

I conducted research for this chapter while on a Lise Meitner Fellowship from the Austrian Science Fund, at the Institute for Culture Studies and Theater History at the Austrian Academy of Sciences. I would like to thank the many helpful comments from conference participants and colleagues, and especially the editors of this volume for their careful editing and engagement with the material. Unless otherwise stated, all translations are my own. 2 Celia Applegate, A Nation of Provincials: The German Idea of Heimat (Berkeley: U of California P, 1990); Elizabeth Boa and Rachel Palfreyman, Heimat: A German Dream; Regional Loyalties and National Identity in German Culture, 1890–1990 (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2000); Alon Confino, The Nation as a Local Metaphor: Württemberg, Imperial Germany, and National Memory, 1871–1918 (Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1997); Thomas Lekan, Imagining the Nation in Nature: Landscape Preservation and German Identity, 1885–1945 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2004). 3 See also Lekan, Imagining the Nation in Nature, 6. 4 Pierre Nora, Realms of Memory: Rethinking the French Past (New York: Columbia UP, 1996); Gunther Hirschfelder, Europäische Esskultur: Eeine Geschichte der Ernährung von der Steinzeit bis heute. (Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 2005). 5 For the case of war and violence see Aleida Assmann, Der lange Schatten der Vergangenheit: Erinnerungskultur und Geschichtspolitik (Munich: C. H. Beck, 2006); Jennifer A. Jordan, Structures of Memory: Understanding Urban Change in Berlin and Beyond (Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 2006); Edward T. Linenthal, The Unfinished Bombing (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2001); Jeffrey Olick and Daniel Levy, “Collective Memory and Cultural Constraint: Holocaust Myth and Rationality in

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German Politics,” American Sociological Review 62, no. 6 (1997): 921–36; and Jay Winter, Remembering War: The Great War between Memory and History in the Twentieth Century (New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 2006). For that of heritage see Diane Barthel, Historic Preservation: Collective Memory and Historical Identity (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP, 1996); Richard Handler and Eric Gable, The New History in an Old Museum: Creating the Past at Colonial Williamsburg (Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1997); and Rudy Koshar, Germany’s Transient Pasts: Preservation and National Memory in the Twentieth Century (Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1998). 6 Cf. Kees de Roest and Alberto Menghi, “Reconsidering ‘Traditional’ Food: The Case of Parmigiano Reggiano Cheese,” Sociologia Ruralis 40, no. 4 (2000): 439–51; Julie Guthman, “Commodified Meanings, Meaningful Commodities: Re-thinking Production-Consumption Links through the Organic System of Provision,” Sociologia Ruralis 42, no. 2 (2002): 295–311; Kolleen Guy, When Champagne Became French: Wine and the Making of a National Identity (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2007); Josée Johnston and Shyon Baumann, “Democracy versus Distinction: A Study of Omnivorousness in Gourmet Food Writing,” American Journal of Sociology 113, no. 1 (2007): 165–204; Alison Leitch, “Slow Food and the Politics of Pork Fat: Italian Food and European Identity,” Ethnos 68, no. 4 (2003): 437–62; Anne Meneley, “Extra Virgin Olive Oil and Slow Food,” Anthropologica 46, no. 2 (2004): 165–76; Keith Warner, “The Quality of Sustainability: Agroecological Partnerships and the Geographic Branding of California Winegrapes,” Journal of Rural Studies 23, no. 2 (2007): 142–55. 7 Ute Scheffler, Alles Soljanka oder wie? Das ultimative DDR-Kochbuch, 1949– 1989 (Leipzig: Buchverlag für die Frau, 2008); see also Sabine Herre, Flusskrebse, Rübchen und Moorschnucken: Deutschlands regionale Spezialitäten (Stuttgart: KlettCotta, 2006); Rainer Horbelt and Sonja Spindler, Die deutsche Küche im 20. Jahrhundert von der Mehlsuppe im Kaiserreich bis zum Designerjoghurt der Berliner Republik; Ereignisse, Geschichten, Rezepte (Frankfurt am Main: Eichborn, 2000); Peter Peter, Kulturgeschichte der deutschen Küche (Munich: Beck, 2008); Michael Stitz and Ingo Swoboda, Deutschland — kulinarisch reisen: Reisen mit InsiderTipps (Ostfildern, Germany: Mairdumont, 2006). 8 Ursula Heinzelmann, “Spreewälder Gurken: Pickled Cucumbers from the Spreewald,” Gastronomica 4, no. 3 (2004): 13. 9 Arnd Bauerkämper, “The Industrialization of Agriculture and Its Consequences for the Natural Environment: An Inter-German Comparative Perspective,” Historical Social Research 29, no. 3 (2004): 124–49; Bauerkämper, “Collectivization and Memory: View of the Past and the Transformation of Rural Society in the GDR from 1952 to the Early 1960s,” German Studies Review 25, no. 2 (2002): 213–25; Ingolf Vogeler, “State Hegemony in Transforming the Rural Landscapes of Eastern Germany: 1945–1994,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 86, no. 3 (1996): 432–58; Christel Nehrig, “Der Umgang mit den unbewirtschafteten Flächen in der DDR: Die Entwicklung der Örtlichen

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Landwirtschaftsbetriebe,” Zeitschrift für Agrargeschichte und Agrarsoziologie 51, no. 2 (2003): 34–46. 10 Vogeler, “State Hegemony,” 437. 11 Ulf Matthiesen, “Esskultur & Regionale Entwicklung — unter besonderer Berücksichtigung von ‘Mark und Metropole’: Perspektivische Skizzen zu einem Forschungsfeld,” Die Botschaft der Botschaften, special issue, Berliner Blätter: Ethnographische und ethnologische Beiträge 34 (2004): 111–45. 12 Stitz and Swoboda, Deutschland — kulinarisch reisen, 7. 13 Scheffler, Alles Soljanka oder wie?, 14. 14 Cf. Tatjana Thelen, “Lunch in an East German Enterprise — Differences in Eating Habits as Symbols of Collective Identities,” Zeitschrift fur Ethnologie 131, no. 1 (2006): 51–70. 15 Matthiesen, “Esskultur & regionale Entwicklung,” n.p. 16 Matthiesen, “Esskultur & regionale Entwicklung,” n.p., Scheffler, Alles Soljanka oder wie? 17 OssiVersand, accessed 9 Jul. 2010, http://www.ossiversand.de. 18 Thelen, “Lunch in an East German Enterprise,” 52. 19 Dorothee Baganz, Trabi, Sandmann, Pioniere: Alltag in der DDR (Petersberg, Germany: Michael Imhof, 2006); Daphne Berdahl, Where the World Ended: Re-unification and Identity in the German Borderland (Berkeley: U of California P, 1999); Thelen, “Lunch in an East German Enterprise.” See also Peter Thompson, “‘Die unheimliche Heimat’: The GDR and the Dialectics of Home,” in “From Stasiland to Ostalgie: The GDR Twenty Years After,” ed. Karen Leeder, special issue, Oxford German Studies 38, no. 3 (2009): 278–87. 20 Thompson, “Die unheimliche Heimat,” 278. 21 Examples include Jürgen Helfricht, Sächsisches Spezialitäten-Backbuch: Schlemmer-Rezepte von Dr. Quendt (Husum: Husum, 2007); Oda Tietz, SachsenAnhalt: Kulinarische Streifzüge: Mit 87 Rezepten (Blaufelden, Germany: Sigloch Edition, 1995); Barbara Rias-Bucher, Bayern: Kulinarische Streifzüge (Blaufelden, Germany: Sigloch Edition, 1993). 22 Matthiesen, “Esskultur & regionale Entwicklung,” 10. 23 Stitz and Swoboda, Deutschland — kulinarisch reisen. 24 The European Commission Website, “EU Agricultural Product Quality Policy,” accessed 14 Jul. 2010, http://ec.europa.eu/agriculture/quality/schemes/index_ en.htm. 25 The eastern products include Thüringer Leberwurst, Thüringer Rostbratwurst, Thüringer Rotwurst, Meissner Fummel, Spreewälder Gurken, Spreewälder Meerrettich, Greussener Salami, Wernesgruener beer, Lausitzer Leinöl, and Altenburger Ziegenkäse. See The European Commission Website, “Agriculture and Food DOOR list,” accessed 8 Jul. 2010, http://ec.europa.eu/agriculture/ quality/door/list.html. Applications are currently pending for an additional nineteen products, three from the East and sixteen from the West 26 Slow Food Deutschland Website, accessed 8 Jul. 2010, http://www.slowfood. de/.

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Confino, The Nation as a Local Metaphor; Boa and Palfreyman, Heimat: A German Dream; Lekan, Imagining the Nation. 28 Heinzelmann, “Spreewälder Gurken,” 14. 29 There are hundreds of newspaper articles about old apple varieties and Streuobstwiesen in the 1990s and 2000s in Germany. Just a very few relevant examples include Julia Schmidt, “Potsdam sorgt sich um altes Obst,” Berliner Zeitung, 3 Jul. 2001; Cathleen Paech, “Vom Aussterben bedrohte Apfelsorten gesucht; Robust und vitaminreich: Erbgut von Goldparmäne und Roter Eiserapfel soll erhalten werden,” Die Welt, 13 Jan. 2003; Claudia Sewig, “Prädikat: Besonders selten; Wilstedter Apfel wurde zum Apfel des Jahres 2005 gewählt,” Hamburger Abendblatt, 18 Apr. 2005; Gunther Nething, “Reminiszenzen an ein schwäbisches Nationalgetränk,” Stuttgarter Zeitung, 9 Oct. 2006; and hss, “Äpfel aus dem 19. Jahrhundert: Erntedankfest; Obst- und Gartenbauverein präsentiert längst vergessene Sorten,” Bürstädter Zeitung, 14 Sept. 2009.; Bozena Gartler, Genuss-Frucht Apfel: Von der Paradiesfrucht zum Tafelobst (Leopoldsdorf, Austria: Österreichischer Agrarverlag, 2003); Eckart Brandt, Mein großes Apfelbuch: Alte Apfelsorten neu entdeckt; Geschichte, Anbau, Rezepte (Munich: Bassermann, 2003); Marina Heilmeyer and Clemens Wimmer, Äpfel fürs Volk (Potsdam: Vacat, 2007); further references to this work are given using the abbreviation ÄV; Joan Morgan, Alison Richards, and Brogdale Horticultural Trust, The Book of Apples (London: Ebury, 1993); Michael Pollan, The Botany of Desire: A Plant’s Eye View of the World (New York: Random House, 2001); James Russell, Man-Made Eden: Historic Orchards in Somerset and Gloucestershire (Bristol, UK: Redcliffe, 2007); Erika Schermaul, Paradiesapfel und Pastorenbirne: Bilder und Geschichten von alten Obstsorten (Ostfildern, Germany: Thorbecke, 2004); Willi Votteler, Altbewährte Apfel- und Birnensorten (Munich: Obst- und Gartenbauverlag des Bayerischen Landesverbandes für Gartenbau und Landespflege, 2008); Peter Wynne, Apples (New York: Hawthorn Books, 1975); Jörg Zirfas, Apfel: Eine kleine kulinarische Anthologie (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1998). 30 Trees and forests have a long tradition of being connected to conceptions of German identity. Lekan quotes Riehl as saying, “We must retain the forest not only to keep our stoves from growing cold in winter, but also to keep the pulse of our nation beating warmly and happily. We need it to keep Germany German.” Lekan, Imagining the Nation, 7. 31 See also Evelyn Thieme and Jutta Schneider, Streuobstwiesen: Alte Obstsorten neu entdeckt (Ostfildern, Germany: Thorbecke, 2008), 14, 38; further references to this work are given using the abbreviation S; Schermaul, Paradiesapfel und Pastorenbirne, 39. 32 Christopher Stocks, Forgotten Fruits: The Stories behind Britain’s Traditional Fruit and Vegetables (London: Random House, 2008). 33 Brandt, Mein großes Apfelbuch, 46. 34 Gunther Nething, “Reminiszenzen an ein schwäbisches Nationalgetränk,” Stuttgarter Zeitung, 9 Oct. 2006; Landschafts-Förderverein Nuthe-Nieplitz

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Website, accessed 14 Jul. 2010, http://www.foerderverein-nuthe-nieplitz.de/lfv/ index-lfv.htm. 35 Mathias Nofze, “Mit Anna Späth kehrt ein Stück Heimat zurück,” GeneralAnzeiger (Bonn), 17 Mar. 2007; Till Ehrlich, “Abschied vom Bembel,” taz, 28 Mar. 2009. 36 Ernst Simader, Mostland Oberösterreich (Linz: Land Oberösterreich, 2006). 37 Walter Hartmann and Eckhart Fritz, Farbatlas alte Obstsorten (Stuttgart: Eugen Ulmar, 2008) Votteler, Altbewährte Apfel- und Birnensorten. 38 Votteler, Altbewährte Apfel- und Birnensorten. 39 Cathleen Paech, “Vom Aussterben bedrohte Apfelsorten gesucht,” Die Welt, 13 Jan. 2003. 40 Julia Schmidt, “Potsdam sorgt sich um altes Obst: Stadt will das Aussterben von einst bekannten Sorten verhindern,” Berliner Zeitung, 3 Jul. 2001. 41 Paech, “Vom Aussterben bedrohte Apfelsorten.” 42 Röling Gollmer, “Zwischen Äpfeln und Birnen,” Berliner Morgenpost, 5 Oct. 2006. 43 According to Boa and Palfreyman, the Heimat movement “embraced activities stretching from environmental planning and countryside protection (Heimatschutz), th[r]ough local history societies, museums documenting local customs and costumes, tourist guidebooks, geography textbooks and syllabuses for primary schoolchildren, to local rambling and sports clubs and folk festivals and touched too on such developments as the German garden city movement and even city allotments. Much of this activity was comparable to what would now be called Bürgerinitiativen, citizens’ initiatives to sustain the quality of life in a locality, and like such presentday activism was politically diverse.” Boa and Palfreyman, Heimat, 2. 44 Jens Blankennagel, “Die Retter der Versailles-Nelke,” Berliner Zeitung, 19 May 2008. 45 VERN website, accessed 14 Jul. 2010, http://www.genres.de/infos/vern/ verein/verein.htm. 46 http://www.genres.de/infos/vern/index.htm, accessed 19 Sept. 2010. 47 NABU website, accessed 19 Sept. 2010, http://www.nabu.de/modules/ linkkatalog/index.php. 48 Pomologen Verein website, accessed 14 Jul. 2010, http://www.pomologenverein.de/Verbaende/Hessen/Sachsen_Anhalt/sachsen_anhalt.html. 49 Marion Klemp, “Willkommen im SchlarAPFELland,” Berliner Kurier, 16 Sept. 2008. 50 Apfelgalerie website, accessed 14 Jul. 2010, http://www.apfelgalerie.de/ Sortengarten/Sortengarten.html. 51 The discussion of Streuobstwiesen is based primarily on the following sources: Helga Faber, Die Welt des Apfelweins (Nidderau, Germany: Naumann, 2006); Manfred Franz, Vom Streuobst zum Apfelwein (Kreuzwertheim, Germany: Wittbach, 2005); Günter Grüner, Das Mostkochbuch: Kochen mit Most, Mostbirnen und Kletzen (Weitra, Austria: Verl. Publication PN 1 — Bibliothek der Provinz, 2007); Gudrun Mangold, Most: Das Buch zu Apfel- und Birnenwein (Tübingen:

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Silberburg, 2003); Simader, Mostland Oberösterreich; Thieme and Schneider, Streuobstwiesen; Christoph Wagner and Lois Lammerhuber, Most (Vienna: Pichler, 1999). 52 Bundesamt für Naturschutz website, accessed 14 Jul. 2010, http://www.bfn. de/glossar_o-s.html. 53 Bundesministerium für Ernährung, Landwirtschaft und Verbraucherschutz website, accessed 18 Sept. 2010, http://www.bmelv.de/SharedDocs/ Standardartikel/Landwirtschaft/Agrarmaerkte/Produkte/KleinundObstbrennereien.html. 54 Augustus Rex website, accessed 14 Jul. 2010, http://www.augustus-rex.com. 55 Augustus Rex website, accessed 14 Jul. 2010.

Part II. Architectural and Filmic Mediations: Germany in Transit and the Urban Condition

4: Topographical Turns: Recasting Berlin in Christian Petzold’s Gespenster Andrew J. Webber

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the territory explored in the last chapter of my recent book, Berlin in the Twentieth Century: A Cultural Topography.1 With this book I aimed to contribute to the topographical turn in cultural criticism and was concerned, in particular, to show how cultural topography is also linked to forms of urban tropography: figurative placements and turnings of urban space that determine its representation in high and popular cultural forms. The figurations — topoi and tropes — in question are partly found in the way in which urban space is cast in civic terms, especially in its representative forms: monuments, memorials, and symbolically invested places. But the book also pursued the claim that the placements and turns in question are fundamentally performative in character — constructed, invested, sustained, and sometimes subverted through turns in another sense — cultural acts. This cluster of assumptions, then, is bundled into the “topographical turns” of the title here. In the chapter in question, I described post-unification films set in Berlin (following the cultural political “turn” of 1989–1990) as occupying an ambivalent position: caught between attachments to past scenarios and to turns in other, more contemporary directions. Across a range of films, I saw the performance of urban identity — on stage, on screen, or in the streets — as the key to that ambivalent condition. The films are suspended between constraint and relative autonomy in the practical, performative achievement of identity, community, and creativity in the city. In the present essay I further explore the transformative potential of such cinematic turns, and their limits, with particular reference to the spectral version of those turns in Christian Petzold’s Gespenster (Ghosts, 2005).2 Gespenster focuses on the vagabond figure of Nina, tracking her through spaces in central Berlin that are represented as off-center, an arena for more marginal experiences. In her intense but passing relationship with another girl, Toni, and the obsessive but transient pursuit of her by a French woman who believes her to be her long-lost daughter, Nina embodies the ghostliness of the film’s title. In this essay I show that Petzold’s film uses fundamental questions of uncertainty in personal memory, and in the construction of identity that HIS ESSAY REVISITS

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depends upon it, to contribute to the interrogation of national memory and collective identity.3 Spaces in the new national capital that are sites of memory but subject to elision and reconstruction provide the arena for the contestation of memory on the interlocking levels of the person, the capital, and the nation. Gespenster explores the haunting hold of historical legacies of destruction, victimization, and loss of life in the post-unification capital. By involving the two girls as aspiring actors in Berlin’s resurgent screen-media industry, it places that exploration explicitly under the sign of performance, casting the ghostliness of the film into an uncertain territory between true experience and play-acting. The performances of lives in the apparently normalized spaces of the contemporary city are seen to be attended by old ghosts in new and ambiguous forms. My aim is to gauge this film’s performative negotiation of the topography of the New Berlin against that of two others, as played out by a varied cast of actor-characters whose performances are troubled in various ways but not, it seems, haunted. Thomas Arslan’s Der schöne Tag (A fine day, 2001) focuses on a young German-Turkish actress, following her passage through the topography of the city on one fine day.4 Casting and dubbing become metaphors for her performance of everyday living as a displaced figure on her way through Berlin, albeit in forms of displacement that are not defined or confined by her German-Turkish identity, much as the scenarios of voice-over and impersonation in the casting session might seem to lend themselves to a critical take on the challenges of a hybrid identity. Stadt als Beute (literally “City as prey (or booty),” Berlin Stories, 2005), by Irene von Alberti, Miriam Dehne, and Esther Gronenborn, focuses on the on- and off-stage, individual and group performances of members of an avant-garde theater ensemble rehearsing the René Pollesch post-dramatic stage happening of the same name.5 These performances, not least in the form of topographical turns, expose the post-unification city as a kind of post-dramatic stage and screen for the enactment of exploitation and counter-exploitation, but also as providing a dramaturgical frame for creative interaction. Petzold’s Gespenster is the second part of his trilogy — with Die innere Sicherheit (Inner security; English title, The State I am In, 2000) and Yella (2007)6 — which represents different kinds of haunted identity as much in the hinterland as at the epicenter of the Berlin Republic, what one reviewer calls the Phantom Republic.7 Here too, the performance of identity is central, carrying with it an attachment to phantom existence. As we will see, Gespenster plays the locational trick of combining hinterland with epicenter. The film summons up something of a cliché of Berlin, as a haunted city and revived capital of a haunted land, visited by what Anne Fuchs has called the phantoms of war.8 The ghost function here corresponds to a particular version of what Derrida styles as hauntology: the shift of being into the liminal, out-of-joint domain of the spectral. It is a domain that

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hosts the haunts of, among others, the specters of Marx and of Marxism that preoccupy Derrida.9 Berlin is a city, we might say, that is especially hauntologized — in post-Marxist terms, but also, in particular, in postHolocaust terms. The transitional territory in which Gespenster is set is as much in the shadow of the adjacent topography of terror as that of the Wall. And the story of the separated family at its core arguably references both topographic regimes. In Petzold’s film the ontological exploration of the figures that ghost through the narrative and of their potential relationships is linked to that of a spectral urban territory cast between two of the city’s reconstructed sites of memory: the Tiergarten and the Potsdamer Platz. It is an authorial mark of Petzold’s version of neo-Realism that the consistency of being, of space, and of material things is cast into a spectral uncertainty: ontology cast into hauntology. The term “cast” is intended to be operative, here, modulating between the casting of roles and the sense of being thrown, in the extreme case thrown away, existentially abandoned. Gespenster repeatedly shifts between the performance of roles as cast and the casting away of figures and the material things to which their identities might attach. Indeed, all three films combine these two kinds of casting, with casting always ready to slip into casting away for the failed film, stage, or social actor. If Gespenster is indeed a ghost film, it seems that the phantom in question is in part a theatrical one, attendant upon the performance of identity, whether given or adopted. Like Stadt als Beute and Der schöne Tag, Gespenster is fundamentally concerned with casting, both in its theatrical or cinematic sense and that of living in the city as more or less felicitous, competitive performances into which characters are cast. Casting is an imported watchword of contemporary German popular culture in a globalized age, and indeed the theater of Stadt als Beute — the Volksbühne’s Prater stage — is located on Kastanienallee, also known as Casting Allee. It is a new turn in a film-city relationship that goes back at least as far as Weimar Berlin and the casting scenarios of “artificial silk girls” and other star-struck inhabitants of a city, produced not least through the fantasy constructions of its film industry.10 In Gespenster, as we will see, the “artificial silk girl” has become the tee-shirt girl, fitted out by the H&M clothes store. A key element of the historical imaginary of modern Berlin turns on dreams of performing in “Berlin: the film”; and in the post-unification period the “film city” fantasy is being cast in new forms. In the case of Gespenster, the diegesis is marked as self-reflexive, concerned with the medium of film, both in its popular entertainment forms and in the technology of surveillance. And the integration of CCTV viewing into the visual regime of the film might indicate that the two are also intimately linked in a kind of hidden — or not-so-hidden — camera reality-show mode. The focal scene in Gespenster of a casting session for a film

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reflects upon the more general politics and ontology of performance in the film’s narrative. Toni, giving advice to her less experienced girlfriend Nina, stresses that for a “casting” you have to tell a story in an “unheimlich lebendig” (“dead lively,” we might say) way. And vitality as the basis of identity stories remains touched by the unheimlich in its other sense (uncanny). As in Der schöne Tag and Stadt als Beute, the motif of casting raises fundamental questions about the ontological condition, the liveness, of lives in the city. The three films, with their thematics of displacement, haunting, and exploitation, recast the performative configuration of identity and topography in today’s Berlin, exploring the possibilities for new turns and the constraints upon these.

Berlin Turns Perhaps the key claim of Berlin in the Twentieth Century concerned the allegorically turned character of cities, and of this city in particular. Cities are, in fundamental ways, systems of image-making, and as such they manage and market themselves allegorically. They are engaged, in other words, in casting, creating roles for themselves and engaging urban actors in those roles: actors who may or may not succeed in or conform to the roles in question. For Berlin today, still a new old capital, this casting is particularly focused on the status of capital in various forms that in their representative character could be called allegorical: as Party Capital, Art Capital, Film Capital and so on. Cities, of course, are prime allegorical constructs (Augustine’s civitas dei would be the classic example); they are called upon to represent ideological conditions of being, to be representational, that is, in a representative mode. Following the model of Walter Benjamin’s critical attention to allegory, a fault line should be seen in this combination of representation and representativeness, and the allegorizations of postWende (literally, turnabout) Berlin are no exception. The argument of Berlin in the Twentieth Century suggested that allegory also conditions less official forms of cultural production in and of a city. Allegory was mobilized in line with its etymology, so that this master figure of urban cultural formation was understood as a means of altering, rendering other (allos), perceptions of urban space and place — more particularly the marketplace (agora) as forum for civic debate. Allegory is conceived, that is, as a means of speaking, writing, and imaging city space in other ways, and this applies in particular to the marketplace as an especially allegorical site for the city The understanding of allegory here follows the urbanological work of Benjamin, who directs the critical method of allegoresis onto the high and low cultures of cities and their marketplaces. And those marketplaces include, not least, the commercial systems of the film and theater businesses. At its extreme, in the anti-capitalist hyperbole

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of Stadt als Beute, this is the allegorical condition of city as hunting-ground for economic and social exploitation. In less extreme form it is the topographical traveling ground for the urbanite as relatively free agent, as in the fine filmic day of Arslan’s film. In either case, the city is allegorically turned to represent as much as to play host to conditions of existence. Allegory, for Benjamin, is cast between the forces of history and forms of fixation, as in the static-dynamic figure of the angelus novus.11 A particular focus here will be to ask how the allegories that contribute to the fashioning of modern Berlin represent the impact that history has had and continues to have upon the city, and the city upon history. Allegory is seen as a device for controlling, but also exposing, the violence of this reciprocal relation and the harm, both external and internal, of its impacts and impactions. In the wake, and the further anticipation, of this violence, the angel of history in its Berlin mode is also a kind of phantom figure. It is analogous, perhaps, to the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church, the ruin that haunts the Kurfürstendamm as premier marketplace of postwar Berlin. We might recall the melancholic angel of Wim Wenders’s Der Himmel über Berlin (The sky over Berlin; English title, Wings of Desire, 198712), posted on that representative ruin at the start of the film. For Benjamin, allegory represents the incorporation of historical ruin into the representational landscape as Hippocratic face (1.1:343). And the Memorial Church as a “hollow tooth,” in popular parlance, can accordingly be seen as a hollow or impacted element of the city’s commercially enhanced physiognomy, a representative feature as allegory of memory, in a city struck in the face by historical damage. The memorial church becomes memory church. The muse of memory, Mneme, says Benjamin, resides in physical decay (1.1:392). Sites and practices of memory are cast here between recuperation and loss. And the memorialization of destruction produced and sustained by National Socialist Berlin is compounded by that of the division of the city that followed it. With Benjamin, we can see the allegorical processes of cultural memory at work at both high and low ends of the market. Most recently, Berlin has been treated as a giant allegorical stage for the performances of a pair of marionette giants presented by the French street-theater company, Royal de luxe. In anticipation of the twentieth anniversary of the fall of the Wall, the Big Giant and his niece, the Little Giant, enacted a dramatic family romance of separation and reunion on the streets and around the monumental and memorial architecture of the capital, incorporating into this allegorical representation of division and unification the distribution of an archive of letters intercepted by the Stasi. It is historical allegory in the historical form of the marionette show, but produced for the mass dynamics of contemporary event culture. The anachronistic, small-scale spectacle of the itinerant show is revived in giant form for a mass urban audience and is ready for diffusion through electronic media. Allegory takes a fairy-tale

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form here, turning on the classic scenario of the lost and recovered child. It is intended to orchestrate recuperation, but as we will see, the allegorical mode — also when it takes the transformative shape of the fairy tale — is more conducive to the return of loss. There are grounds to be wary of the allegory of reunion — be it in the form of the Giants or, in another recent mass orchestration of post-unification assembly and spectacle, the 2006 Soccer World Cup: Germany, a Summer’s Tale.13 The fairy tale is a winning fantasy of transformation, but it is bound to fail in its goal of representative representation. In the case of the Giants, dredged up from the Spree and apparently saved from drowning, we might be inclined to look for uncanniness in the Leviathan constructions entering the city and taking it over as showground for their drama between life and death. We might want to see the engaging popular spectacle through the lens of the locus classicus of the uncanny, E. T. A. Hoffmann’s Der Sandmann (The sand man, 1816), with its scenario of the undead doll as an object of fantasy projection and the catastrophic gigantism of its finale. Or, if not that Hoffmann “night piece,” there is the anti–fairy tale of specular projection set at the heart of the nineteenth-century city, Ein ödes Haus (A deserted house, 1817) — an allegorical inhabitation of uncanny abandonment hidden in full view on the representative boulevard of Unter den Linden. Or we might consider the melancholic perspective onto the market of life that is allegorized in his Des Vetters Eckfenster (My cousin’s corner window, 1822), casting the nineteenth-century marketplace of the Gendarmenmarkt into a kind of market of undeadness.14 The early twentyfirst-century marketplace of Berlin, with the filmic and other life-like spectacles that are produced in and for it, retains that attachment to mortality. The marketplace then, as the representative space of urban life, is cast into states of otherness by its allegorical appropriation: allos agora. While the Memorial Church disrupts the marketplace gloss of the Kurfürstendamm, here we look to another marketplace. It is one that also flourished in the reality and the mythology of the Weimar years, was struck, apparently fatally, by history, and has been resurrected at the millennium: the Potsdamer Platz. It is a site called upon to be something of a new agora for Berlin as capital of the Berlin Republic and a capital of culture, or cultural capital, of wider currency. This status is assigned, not least, through the hosting of the Berlinale as culture show amidst the high-rise architecture of high capital, displaying Berlin as film city, constructed around the media marketplace and circus tent of the Sony Center. It is the same Sony Center as is excoriated in the hyperbolic anti-Capitalist tirades against Berlin as relaunched capital of culture in Stadt als Beute. The case of Berlin shows that to be a capital of culture is to trade in cultural capital in a particularly active, demonstrative, and highly invested fashion. It is to engage in the exchange between different senses of capital

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that Benjamin registers (GW, 5.1:52), so that capitalism is also understandable through capitalism, trading on the status of the capital city. If Berlin is, following Mayor Wowereit’s much-quoted slogan, “poor but sexy,” cash-poor but richly endowed in cultural capital and libido, it aspires to recast itself for glamorous, internationally acknowledged roles. And this raises questions about the roles that are cast for, or can be cast by, its inhabitants.

Ghosts of Berlin The cultural-capital casting fantasy — with Berlin allegorized in the media marketplace construction of Potsdamer Platz — is certainly a key part of the logic of Gespenster. But the question is, what does it have to do with the more evident, eponymous allegorical identity of the film, a ghost film set in a place all too easily allegorized as city of ghosts.15 It is the allegorically mediated relationship between cultural economy, political history, ontological identity, and the ghostly that is of interest here, in an elaboration of the paradigm of hauntology developed by Derrida through the uncanny afterlife of Communism in Specters of Marx. Gespenster opens with two scenes in cross-cut. A car, with a man at the wheel and a woman by his side, is seen arriving in Berlin and driving through the Tiergarten, accompanied by the melancholic beauty of a Bach cantata, and the aria “Streams of Salty Tears” (“Bäche von gesalznen Zähren”). It is interrupted only by the mechanical voice of the navigating system, telling the driver — in French — which way to turn. And a figure, who turns out to be Nina, the protagonist of the film, is seen gathering rubbish, set apart from a group of One-Euro-Jobbers, in what becomes recognizable as the Tiergarten. The figures scouring this ground in their fluorescent orange jackets are also visually understandable as working a site of crime, accident, or other catastrophe. In the diegetic soundtrack of the Bach cantata, landscape in its urban form and cityscape are bound, allegorically, by streams of tears, cast melancholically for the figures who enter the film and whose narratives will intersect in a kind of mutual haunting. It introduces into the film the element of water, with its associations for Petzold’s filmworks of fatality and ambiguous, ghostly reemergence into life. In the urban-pastoral landscape of the Tiergarten, Nina sees another young woman, who is dragged behind a tree and brutalized by two men.16 She watches, frozen, and picks up the earring that had fallen to the ground in the struggle. When the other girl, who becomes known as Toni, tries to steal from the garbage-pickers’ caravan, and a chase ensues, Nina finds her discarded shoe and meets her under the bridge by the water; the two isolated girls are set to become friends, then lovers. Nina gives Toni one of

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her tee-shirts, and they both discard the tops they had been wearing: Nina’s orange jacket and Toni’s shirt, which was torn in the struggle. They head off first for breakfast in a café in the Tiergarten and then to the institutional home where Nina lives. Meanwhile, the woman in the car is seen walking down hospital corridors, limping because of what turns out to be a broken shoe. As her husband takes her back to the car and then their hotel room, it becomes clear that she has been involved in a struggle or attack of some kind, and her torn top and broken shoe are the “injury” she has sustained. In the hotel room she tells her husband to pay off the girl. It will become clear that the Parisian woman is searching for the daughter stolen from her outside a supermarket years earlier, and the girl who is to be paid off is the latest in a series of mistaken identities. When she chances to see Toni and Nina from her hotel window, the scene is set for another attempt to find her lost daughter. Nina, who is inward and uncertain, is drawn to the strong, streetwise Toni and follows her through a sequence of attempts to reclaim what is hers or steal what is not. When they steal clothes from the H&M store, tracked by CCTV cameras, a woman puts her hand on Nina’s shoulder as she exits the Potsdamer Platz Arcades; it is not a store detective but the Parisian woman. After a chase, the woman seeks to claim Nina as her daughter, identifying her in the classic Odyssean mode of anagnorisis through a scar on her ankle and a birthmark between her shoulder-blades. We see the first traumatic evidence of identity, but not the second. Toni, suspicious and jealous, picks the woman’s pockets and runs off with Nina. The wallet, with pictures of the little lost daughter, she casts away into a bin in the waste ground of the eastern corner of the Tiergarten. Toni then takes Nina to the casting, set in the Universal Studios office in the MediaSpree area — prime casting territory for the New Berlin. The conceit is for two girls to talk about their friendship, and they put on matching tee-shirts marked Girlfriends (Freundinnen) to do so. Toni plays out her much-rehearsed story of Nina saving her from potential drowning, while Nina — a stand-in for Toni’s ex-girlfriend — is resolutely silent. Then, after the casting seems to have finished in failure, Nina begins to tell a story that is a fantasy enactment of her encounter with Toni in the Tiergarten. She presents the encounter as the realization of her recurrent dreams, with the Tiergarten scene transposed to a wood, the sexual intimacy that she only experiences later implanted into it, and with the man who has made off into the wood with Toni driving an open-top car that references the Parisian couple in the other narrative strand. While it is not clear whether the casting does indeed fail, it succeeds at least as a sort of casting-couch, when the girls are invited by the director to a party at his house, and Toni abandons Nina to sleep with him. The Parisian woman returns to the supermarket where her child was apparently stolen: the scene of the child being taken is shown in a spectral

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form of CCTV footage, whether as a real document of the event or a kind of post-traumatic film on the woman’s mind-screen. The abandoned Nina returns to the spot where the woman revealed herself as her putative mother and finds her there again. These two now have breakfast together, before the woman’s husband intervenes and tells a distressed Nina, crying out for her Mama, that his wife is very sick. The woman asks him to pay Nina off, and they leave. In the final scene, a solitary Nina retraces her steps to the bin where the wallet was cast away and finds in it a series of images of a girl, the first a photograph, and the others projections of what she might look like over time. She throws the wallet and images away once more and walks off into the empty parkland. The scenario for Gespenster, which was cowritten by Harun Farocki, derives from a syncretic set of sources. There is Cesare Pavese’s novel, The Fine Summer (1949), about the exploitation of young girls by the artists for whom they act as models; the Love Parade narrative Rave (1998) by Rainald Goetz; the Grimm fairy tale “Das Totenhemdchen” (The little death shroud); the experience that Petzold had while in the Ardennes of seeing posters of lost children with their images digitally projected into “phantom portraits” of how they might have come to look; and there is Murnau’s Gothic masterpiece, Nosferatu (1922).17 Nosferatu it is that apparently provided the title for the film, through the ghosts that portentously encounter Murnau’s protagonist as he crosses the bridge into the land of the vampire. What had been two scenarios, one about casting and one about the loss of a child and its phantom afterlife, were combined, and with this the genres of coming-of-age exploitation story, rave generation narrative, fairy tale of human loss, and Gothic ghost-fantasy were hybridized. The Grimms’ fairy-tale has a typically allegorical character, a study of mourning as a fixed or fixated condition. The bereft mother has to be made to let go of her dead son, metonymically represented by his little shroud, drenched by her tears. In Gespenster, this cautionary tale about overcoming melancholic attachment is transposed to the modern scene.18 Specifically, the loss of the child takes place when the mother is visiting Berlin in 1989, as if the traumatic separation were a side-effect of the historical turmoil of unification. It is, perhaps, not by chance that the scene for the abduction is a supermarket and that the mother should lose her child while shopping, so that the spectral replay of the scene has a form of marketplace as its scene. This is the context for shopping, buying, and paying-off to feature as a leitmotif in the working out of the narrative of loss and attempted restitution. As Berlin experiences the euphoric stage of its bipolar historical condition, traumatic division is reintroduced in a personal narrative caught up in that euphoria. What this produces is a case history of melancholic morbidity, a sort of undeadness. The personal ghost that haunts the mother,

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driving her post-traumatic rituals, is also a kind of historical specter, an allegorical embodiment of the scars and losses of the city. The diminutive shroud of the fairy tale, the melancholic object in which the tears of the dead and the living are mixed, is transferred in Gespenster into the trading, buying, giving, reclaiming, stealing, and casting away of shirts and other items of clothing and jewelry. For the reenactment of the Grimms’ fairytale for the rave generation, the little death shroud is converted into a little tee-shirt from H&M. And the exchanges of clothing are cast ambiguously between acts of love and restitution, on the one hand, and recasting into abandonment and the melancholic condition of undeadness on the other.19 In filmic terms, this undeadness is paradigmatically the condition of the vampire, and the exchanges between the characters are also understandable as ambiguously poised between acts of rescue and vampiric attachments. Murnau’s protagonist crosses the bridge into the land of the phantoms, and similarly Gespenster starts with the Parisian couple driving into Berlin on an overpass and Nina finding Toni hidden under a bridge in the Tiergarten. Berlin, it seems, is characterized as a latter-day land of phantoms, and the eastern reaches of the Tiergarten, where the landscaped parkland meets the border wasteland from the days of the Wall, as a particular site of haunting. The recurrent switching between this phantom, abandoned landscape and the apparent glamorous materiality of the Potsdamer Platz architecture in fact suggests a crossover between the two. In either case, the film avoids the signposting of its topographies with iconic structures in postcard style, instead modulating in more oblique fashion between landscaped and built environments. The intention seems to be to establish a mise-en-scène that is uncertain and transitional: at a remove from the conventional points of reference of its prime locations. The haunted condition involves a kind of parallel topographical dimension, associated with such key landmarks as the Siegessäule (Victory Column) or the Potsdamer Platz, but also displaced from their representative reach.20 Gespenster persistently refuses to yield the ready consumer pleasure and tour-guide orientation of the postcard film. Petzold discovered the potential site for the film when he took time out from a screening of Wolfsburg at the Berlinale in 2003. He wandered away from the Potsdamer Platz — the display-screen for Berlin as film-city — and found himself in a space of abandonment. The wasteland that abuts the Potsdamer Platz is also its repressed foundation, recalling the ruin of what was there before. The star architect, Rienzo Piano, who created the master plan for the new Potsdamer Platz, saw the ground as haunted by the unredeemed ghost of Berlin history.21 Accordingly, the Steadicam that is used to track the characters in the Tiergarten, and that is intended to have the gliding character of dream sequences, also suggests a phantom form of viewing: a ghost in the cinematographic machine.22 It is transferred

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to the scenes around the Potsdamer Platz and potentiated in this new bastion of commerce, a domain “patrolled by private security companies”23 and monitored by CCTV, as in the footage of the two girls finding their way out of the clothes shop. CCTV is a leitmotif for the films of the Gespenster trilogy, embodying different forms of un-living experience. In Gespenster, it is the phantom image of urban paranoia, caught between theft and the specter of terrorism, and — like the casting scene — it acts as a form of mise-en-abîme for the city film. Petzold’s original intention had been to film Gespenster among the ruins of UFA film-sets from the Weimar era in the landscape around Woltersdorf outside Berlin. But the transposition into the center of Berlin, casting back and forth between the blank newly built structures in the city’s resuscitated marketplace and the ghostly wasteland, has the effect of rendering the intact, smooth architecture as spectral, latter-day deserted houses in the manner of Hoffmann. This is perhaps what Petzold means by the “remains” of that ruined film-landscape that remain in the film, between city and forest, carrying with them the remnants of Weimar film mythology, from Joe May’s Das indische Grabmal (The Indian tomb, 1921) to Nosferatu.24 CCTV provides the optic for the phantom life that inhabits the ghost houses and the transitional spaces between interior and exterior space. As Benjamin describes allegory as the incorporation of the process of ruin that is history into the landscape as its scene or showplace (Schauplatz; GW, 1.1:353), so that figure — here in the form of representative architecture for the capital (and for capital) — is collapsed back into ground. Berlin is, after all, built on sand, both actually and allegorically. And the sand is revealed in the “tracks” of this boundary zone at the center of the city, what Petzold calls the “no-man’s land of the Warsaw Pact.”25 It is a place at once of abandonment, nonentity, and ambiguous enchantment. The scrub around the Potsdamer Platz, the historically left-over extension of the death-strip in the so-called Lenné-Triangle, is a form of Benjamin’s melancholy Schauplatz, and the architecture of the Potsdamer Platz is its phantom scenography. In Gespenster the marketplace is rendered other — as allos agora. It is set under the sign of ruin, perhaps less in the Baroque mode of Benjamin’s Trauerspiel book than in the Gothic style of Nosferatu, where ruined architecture is built into phantom landscapes.26 The ruined Wall may have been removed from the territory of Ghosts, making way for building projects, but it ghosts around the new architecture. While ghosts are typically site-specific, revisiting familiar places in the manner of the child from the Grimms’ tale, occupying these and rendering them uncanny, they also have the potential to wander into other spaces. These are the unsettled phantoms of war,27 also Cold War, that are abroad like the revolutionary ghost of Communism in Marx’s famous formulation, coopted by Derrida: “A specter is abroad in Europe” (Ein Gespenst

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geht um in Europa).28 When ghosts are abroad in the representative spaces of the city, assuming an allegorical function, altering public space or exposing its alterity, so they come to embody the sort of condition that Derrida understands by hauntology. The personal ghost that haunts the ontological security of the subject is also a more general ghost that haunts collective life in history, a ghost of Berlin as the representative geopolitical location of violent loss and euphoric reunion in the twentieth century. While the personal ghost, attached to a personal place, might be taken to corroborate ontological identity even as a shadow of it, Derrida’s hauntology supposes a more general hauntedness, never reducible to the individual. The specter is represented in the uncannily impersonal form of the German, “es spukt” (literally, it’s haunting).29 The personal ghosts of King Hamlet or Marx might be said to be effects of a more general spectrality: the ghostly, rotten state of Hamlet’s Denmark or the phantom returns of Marxism after its autopsy at the hands of neo-liberal capitalism. The king is the spectral “thing” of his son but also of the order of state. The site-specificity of the personal ghost is superseded by an ambulant hauntedness (“Ein Gespenst geht um”). Some phantom thing is going around in public space and disturbing any collective fantasies of unification in popular sovereignty. This “es spukt” accords with the bearing of Petzold’s filmwork, following his desire to make a work of posthistoire, the afterlife and aftershock of history.30 It is registered both in the camerawork and in the uncannily insistent effects of diegetic soundtrack, where familiar sound — the rushing of wind in trees in Gespenster — becomes strangely unfamiliar. In Petzold’s films, ghostliness travels with figures moving on foot, executing topographical turns through exterior and interior spaces; and is transported, especially in cars, which are repeatedly the gliding and always potentially catastrophic vehicles of hauntedness. If Wolfsburg draws Petzold as Auto-City for the eponymous car-trauma film, the other towns and cities he explores also become allegorized as auto-cities, and the landscapes as auto-landscapes. This might suggest another — on the face of it unlikely — allegorical identity for Berlin as it is entered by BMW at the start of Gespenster: the auto-capital. With and without the help of cars, the personal story goes around in public space. As in the first of the Gespenster trilogy films, Die innere Sicherheit, where the ghosts of national and family life are those of terrorism, hauntology implies that correlation between the personal and the public. The “innere Sicherheit” (internal security) of post-RAF Germany is another kind of allegorical condition, involving historical specters and internal insecurities of both national and personal kinds. And the same can be said of the ghost narrative in the third part of Petzold’s trilogy, Yella, where it is as much the double-dealings of neoliberal capitalism in small-town Brandenburg as the family life of the protagonist that is haunted.

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The hauntological condition of the Gespenster trilogy, like that of Hamlet as analyzed by Derrida, is at once personal, familial, and profoundly political. It is an allegorical embodiment or quasi-embodiment of a system that is out of joint. Like Nosferatu, this is the sort of phantom spirit that disrupts family life but is also visited allegorically upon the wider order of things. The ending of Gespenster is deeply uncertain in this respect. Is Nina, as she heads off along the tracks between wasteland and agora, carrying with her a new kind of internal security? While she seems to have been a prey of those that attach themselves to her and then abandon her, does she remain the exploited victim of a ghost-story in the BeuteStadt, the City of Exploitation? Or does she cast away the ghosts that have haunted her narrative, following the recuperative logic of “The Little Death Shroud”? Having been cast for and by others in phantom roles, is she ready to achieve a more positive, autonomous agency in the city, to manage the topographical turns that it requires of her? This would be an alternative form of allegorical casting for the city, as a place of exploration and encounter. It would be less a territory for hunting, or being hunted as prey, than a scene for such acts of performance as cruising and thus a potential playground for renegotiating identity in relation to the other. This would mean seeing Nina as a young urban woman cast on the model of Deniz, the protagonist of Der schöne Tag: cruising the city;31 a displaced person perhaps, but ultimately self-possessed rather than possessed by the other. Or is she more genuinely the ghost in question, abroad in the German capital and set to possess other narratives and turn the topography that she inhabits into the spectral? This would be the contagious, melancholic, undead logic of the vampire. She carries, after all, the name of Harker’s wife in Stoker’s Dracula, whose filmic alter ego sacrifices herself to banish Nosferatu but also seems to be telepathically linked to the land of phantoms, a kind of sympathetic medium for vampiric haunting. The internal insecurity that marks Petzold’s film, the failure or refusal to vouchsafe the ontological constitution of the characters, leaves the transformation of this ghost of Berlin uncertain. And hand in hand with the ontological insecurity goes the hauntological, transferring the haunting to the domain of the historical and to the lives of others. This slight figure, disappearing back into the hinterland at the center of the New Berlin, may indeed be understandable as an allegorical one: the ghost of history in general and of the Wende, in particular, representing what remains lost in and after the historical turning moment of reunification. Or perhaps she goes her own way, resisting such allegorization as a figure of haunting in the cultural transformation of the land and the capital city in which she is lost and found.

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Notes 1

Andrew J. Webber, Berlin in the Twentieth Century: A Cultural Topography (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2008), 261–97. 2 Christian Petzold, Gespenster (Germany, France: Schramm Film Koerner & Weber, Les Films des Tournelles, Bayerischer Rundfunk (BR), 2005). 3 On the construction of individual and collective memory see Aleida Assmann, “Von individuellen zu kollektiven Konstruktionen der Vergangenheit,” in Der lange Schattten der Vergangenheit: Erinnerungskultur und Geschichtspolitik (Munich: Beck, 2006), 21–60; Maurice Halbwachs, On Collective Memory, ed. and trans. Lewis A. Coser (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1992). On the contested nature of postWende cultural memory see Anne Fuchs and Mary Cosgrove, “Introduction: Memory Contests and the Management of the Past,” in German Memory Contests: The Quest for Identity in Literature, Film, and Discourse since 1990, ed. Anne Fuchs, Mary Cosgrove, and George Grote, 2nd ed. (2006; repr., Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2010), 1–21. 4 Thomas Arslan, Der schöne Tag (Germany: Pickpocket Production, zero film, ZDF, 2001). 5 Irene von Alberti, Miriam Dehne, and Esther Gronenborn, Stadt als Beute (Germany: Film Galerie, 2005). 6 Petzold, Die innere Sicherheit (Germany: Schramm Film, Hessischer Rundfunk (HR), Arte, 2000), and Yella (Germany: Schramm Film Koerner & Weber, Zweites Deutsches Fernsehen (ZDF), ARTE, 2007). 7 Fritz Göttler, “Leben jenseits der Brücke: Bilder aus der Phantomrepublik — Christian Petzolds Gespenster kommt in die Kinos,” Süddeutsche Zeitung, 14 Sept. 2005. 8 See Anne Fuchs, Phantoms of War in Contemporary German Literature, Films and Discourse: The Politics of Memory, 2nd ed. (2008; repr., Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010). 9 See Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, & the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York: Routledge, 1994). 10 The protagonist of Irmgard Keun’s Das kunstseidene Mädchen (The Artificial Silk Girl, 1932) is not only metonymically fabricated by what she wears but also by the media image of the film star. 11 See Walter Benjamin, Gesammelte Werke, ed. Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhäuser, 7 vols. (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1991), 1.2:697–98. Further references to this work are given in the text using the abbreviation GW where necessary. 12 Wim Wenders, Der Himmel über Berlin (West Germany, France: Road Movies Filmproduktion, Argos Films, Westdeutscher Rundfunk (WDR), 1987). 13 See also Webber, Berlin, 299. 14 For the returns of these uncanny tales, see also Webber, Berlin, 45–47, 92–95. 15 See especially Brian Ladd, The Ghosts of Berlin: Confronting German History in the Urban Landscape (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1997).

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This and other scenes in the Tiergarten recall its historical origin as a hunting park. 17 F. W. Murnau, Nosferatu: Eine Symphonie des Grauens (Germany: Jofa-Atelier Berlin-Johannisthal, Prana-Film GmbH, 1922). 18 As Hinrichsen notes, the film has various other classic fairy-tale resonances. Jens Hinrichsen, “Im Zwischenreich: Christian Petzold’s Gespenster-Trilogie: Passagen in Schattenzonen deutscher Realität,” Filmdienst, 10 Apr. 2009. Indeed, the Cinderella scenario is referenced, in a queer and déclassé version, by the Lumpensammlerin or ragpicker Nina finding Toni’s lost shoe. 19 One of the tee-shirts that Nina wears features an image of a sailing boat, advertising the Chiemsee Regatta. Beyond the casting story, it might reference the sailing ship that bears Nosferatu away from the land of ghosts. Hinrichsen (“Im Zwischenreich”) also draws connections between the obsessive water interests of the trilogy and other water-borne monster narratives. 20 In the scene where Nina and Toni have breakfast together in the café on the Großer Stern, this topographical obliquity is ironically signposted by the framing of the shot, which refuses to provide a view of the Siegessäule and truncates the sign indicating the way to the monument to a corner reading “säule” (column). 21 Piano, in interview for Gaby Imhof-Weber’s film Architektur der Jahrtausendwende: Berlin (Germany: Bayrischer Rundfunk, 2001). 22 So says Petzold in the “Making of” on the DVD. 23 See Jennifer Jordan, Structures of Memory: Understanding Urban Change in Berlin and Beyond (Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 2006), 125. 24 Joe May, Das indische Grabmal (Germany: May Film, 1921). See press brochure for Gespenster (no page numbers). 25 Petzold in interview with Christina Nord, Tageszeitung, 15 Feb. 2005. 26 The two girls, with their pale features and dark hair, are presented in Gothic style, heightened by more or less monochromatic effects. 27 As Petzold notes in the press brochure, “The Little Death Shroud” is also a ghost story of the Thirty Years War. 28 Derrida, Specters of Marx, 99. 29 Derrida, Specters of Marx, 172–73. 30 Petzold in interview with Ulrich Kriest, Stuttgarter Zeitung, 20 Sept. 2005. 31 Deniz “cruises” both on the U-Bahn and in the Tiergarten. Similarly, when Nina and Toni meet in the Tiergarten, they enact a version of the same-sex encounters that have historically animated the park and its imaginary.

5: Interrupting Unity: The Berlin Wall’s Second Life on Screen — A Transnational Perspective Deniz Göktürk

O

9 November 1989 I had dinner at a friend’s home in my former neighborhood of Schöneberg in Berlin. At some point the phone rang, and another friend informed us that the border had been opened. In disbelief, we both assumed that this was a joke. My host did not have a television set, so I cycled home, switched on my little black-andwhite TV, and there it was: pictures of people climbing over the Wall and driving through checkpoints. Not until the next day did I venture out to see real border crossers at Bornholmer Strasse. Despite my status as a resident of the city, my first exposure to this historical event was, as for most spectators around the world, via media — a telephone conversation and televised images. The final scene in Leander Hausmann’s film Herr Lehmann (2003) sums up this mediated experience with pointed irony.1 In a Kreuzberg bar, where a group of young artists and dropouts is hanging out, a portable black-and-white television is transmitting images of East German Trabis being welcomed by the crowds. Among the television viewers, one woman asks: “Habt ihr schon gehört? Die Mauer is offen. Die kommen jetzt alle rüber.” (Have you heard? The Wall is open. They are all coming over now.) At that moment, the film cuts to a counter shot of the unimpressed Kreuzbergers, who continue to sip their beer. The camera angle, slightly from above, suggests that the television is looking back at these mavericks who have themselves turned into a spectacle in their enclosed little space in Kreuzberg. This state of “distant viewing” and disbelief continued for quite some time. As we look back and remember, it becomes apparent that the mediated “production of locality”2 occurs in a global horizon and that historic moments are produced as events through their recurring presence in circulating images. More importantly, the bar scene demonstrates that spectators show different levels of engagement and participation in mediated events depending on their social location and affiliation. The variety of their responses challenges any unifying account of history. N THE EVENING OF

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“Come together and learn to live as friends” was the motto for an advertising campaign launched in 1989 by the cigarette company Peter Stuyvesant in sync with other multiculturalist sales strategies (for example United Colors of Benetton). It made its appearance on posters showing happy and beautiful biracial couples, which appeared on billboards all over West Berlin, showcasing multiethnicity, but not, as Der Spiegel commented, “the really existing Turks, Poles, and Tamils” in the city.3 Aras Ören references this campaign ironically in his novel Berlin Savignyplatz (1995) when, in the days following the fall of the Wall, a commissioned article about the Charlottenburg bohème (with its subliminal connections to Kreuzberg) written for the local newspaper had to give way to a “Come Together” advertisement.4 There is thus a temporal coincidence between the end of the Cold War, unification, and the visual discovery of multiculturalism, although the fashionably selective staging of diversity often appears decoupled from the presence of actual migrants. What remains of divided Berlin today? Screen images of the walled-in or post-Wall city, whether actual or restaged at the Babelsberg Studio, are the most prominent relics. The projected second life of the Wall can yield comic interventions that disrupt the official or corporate language of “coming together.” This essay focuses upon debates on migration and public memory in a heterogeneous society, which are enacted in the social sciences, literature, and other domains, including film. The exhibition Projekt Migration (2005), with its central emphasis on screens, provides an example for staging the archive of migration as an art project. Some films shown during a special program of this event, including Schwarzfahrer (a title with a double meaning which translates as both Black Rider and Fare Dodger, 1993), and Sinan Çetin’s Turkish production Propaganda (1999) are read as ironic enactments of disjuncture and unity that point beyond Germany.5 Above all, my essay seeks to promote a transnational perspective on the fall of the Wall and the subsequent reimagining of the German nation — a perspective that takes seriously the shift from Volk to Bevölkerung proposed by Bertolt Brecht in 1935 and implemented at the Reichstag by artist Hans Hacke in 2000.6 Expanding the horizon to include the trajectories and imaginations of those not considered ethnically German suggests that moving images produced in other countries and languages, for example in Turkey, might have something to contribute to the ways in which we think about German configurations today. Drawing on postcolonial theory and a comparison between India and Europe, Anil Bhatti has recently argued that an emphasis on “similarity” rather than “identity versus alterity,” might liberate us from the homogenizing myth of a monolingual society and enable us to embrace “plurilingualism” and “hermeneutic abstinence” — an operative practice of getting along without having to understand each other at all times.7 The examples discussed below offer potential for translingual contact, irony, and interac-

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tion that the rhetoric of unification elided — unfulfilled possibilities that beg to be unearthed in a more comprehensive picture of a Germany in Transit,8 shaped by inbound and outbound flows of transnational migration, European integration, and globalization.

Migrant Memories On the basis of sixteen interviews with Turkish migrants and their offspring in Berlin in the years 2000 through 2002, Nevim Çil has argued that unification triggered a wave of nationalization, revitalized descentbased definitions of belonging in Germany, and led to the socioeconomic marginalization of migrants.9 Young Turks in Germany felt left out of the festivities.10 Nonetheless, migration and settlement from the South and East have probably transformed Germany in more lasting ways than the fall of the Wall — recurrent debates about “integration” notwithstanding. How is shared memory defined in an immigrant society?11 How do national monolingual frameworks and media platforms limit our imagination? Memory blockages and the difficulty of coming to terms with the “triangulation of East Germans, West Germans, and foreigners” have haunted post-1990 debates about the unification of the two Germanys.12 The new citizenship law that came into effect in 2000 under the RedGreen coalition government led by Gerhard Schröder made naturalization more accessible, although it is still contingent upon economic criteria and a citizenship test. According to census statistics, every fifth German today has a “migration background,” but the question of how to define Germanness vis-à-vis the country’s Others is far from resolved. The specter of “parallel societies” as security hazards has become even more virulent since 9/11. Hence the emphasis in migration debates almost invariably tends to be on problems of integration — a concept that is loaded with assumptions about a unified and bounded future that one can only imagine at the cost of forgetting multiple trajectories in the past. Meanwhile, European integration is proceeding on another plane, reconfiguring the nation-state within a new supranational structure with shifting borders. Cosmopolitanism in Germany today is largely imagined in the realm of native Germans entering into European or global connections, not in relation to the presence of migrant citizens who bring their languages and experiences to the table. With regard to Turkey’s pending bid to join the European Union, the most prominent social historian of Wilhelminian Germany, Hans-Ulrich Wehler, proclaimed at the German historians’ annual convention in 2002 that Muslims cannot be integrated and that Turkey has no place in Europe — a view shared by Chancellor Angela Merkel.13

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In an interview, the writer Zafer S¸enocak claimed that it is impossible to immigrate into a country’s history.14 He proceeded to question the idea of collective memory based on ethnic belonging and asked whether immigrants could participate in shaping a common future without sharing the same history as natives. Fiction brings histories into play. In his novel Gefährliche Verwandtschaft (Perilous kinship, 1998), S¸enocak stages entangled histories of victims and perpetrators, moving swiftly between fragments from the present and the past.15 Memories of the Armenian genocide and of exile from Nazi Germany in Turkey all converge into one transnational family story filled with ironic twists and memory lapses. These “touching tales,” as Leslie Adelson has elaborated in her analysis of Turkish, German, and Jewish triangulations in the post-Wende era,16 can be read as imaginative work that begins to chart the blank spots in public perception of monumentalized history and compartmentalized identities. More recently, historiography in Germany has begun to address questions of memory politics in an immigrant society17 and the ways in which young migrants relate to “borrowed history.”18 Whose unity are we talking about when we are “reimagining the nation”? What is forgotten and left out of German-German narratives of unification? Can we begin to imagine transnational migration as part of German history of the postwar and post–Cold War eras? Who tells the stories of migration? When, where, and how do such stories intersect with national history books and global networks? How do they circulate in the age of digital media? What are the points of access to an archive in transit?19 Clearly, the end of the Cold War was not an intra-German affair but occurred in a constellation of international power politics and diplomatic maneuvers that created a unified Germany.20 Meanwhile, Europe is more than ever “a borderland,” as Etienne Balibar has emphasized.21 Despite the liberalization of mobility within the Schengen Area, the European Union has fortified its exterior boundaries. Borders are regularly negotiated in quotidian and institutional settings. Public speech and administrative regulations produce different categories of strangers who in turn enact their foreignness. Balibar conceives of Europe as “overlapping open regions” (EB, 210) that are shaped by “crossover,” the coexistence of languages, religions, and cultures with origins all around the world — in the words of Edward Said, “a series of assembled peripheries” (EB, 200). Following Umberto Eco, Balibar argues that “‘translation’ is the common language of Europe” (EB, 206), but he also points to the “limits” (EB, 207) and the “conflictual model of the process of translation” (EB, 208), which could serve as a template for “cosmopolitical citizenship” (EB, 211). The challenge lies in conceptualizing Europe as a space of heterogeneity and “fragmentary unison,”22 where spectators engage with mediated events in different modes and languages.

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The transnationalization of Germany and indeed of Europe was already well underway before 1989. The rhetoric of European solidarity permeates the first bilateral labor recruitment treaty that was signed with Italy in 1955,23 followed in 1957 by the Treaty of Rome, which laid the foundation for the European Economic Community and the freedom of movement between member countries. Turkey first applied for associate membership in the European Economic Community as early as 1959 and established an association with the EEC in 1964, although full membership in the EU and freedom of movement have not yet been realized. The enclosure of the GDR on 13 August 1961 cut off mobility and labor migration from East Germany to West Germany. The ensuing need to expand the workforce paved the way for West Germany’s already planned signing of a bilateral recruitment treaty with Turkey on 30 October of the same year. The nexus between these two events does not figure prominently in public memorialization of Germany as a divided and reunified nation.

Exhibiting Migration as Project Although Germany, a country that seems to have a museum for everything, does not have a museum of immigration, the fiftieth anniversary of the first labor recruitment treaty with Italy was marked by an important exhibition. Projekt Migration opened at the Kölnischer Kunstverein’s building “Die Brücke” (the bridge) and four other temporary exhibition sites across Cologne. The show was the final event in a three-year-long initiative, endowed with five million Euros by the Bundeskulturstiftung (German Federal Cultural Foundation). As the title Projekt Migration proclaims, migration is an ongoing project, history in the making.24 The Documentation Center and Museum of Migration in Germany (DOMiD), along with the Kölnischer Kunstverein and the Frankfurt-based research group Transit Migration, formed part of the curatorial team of Projekt Migration. DOMiD had already organized several previous exhibitions25 and has been one of the most vocal promoters of a permanent migration museum in Germany, following the model of Ellis Island in New York. In a decidedly non-permanent venture, pointedly combining art installations with a documentation of social history, the temporary exhibition Projekt Migration picked up on crucial questions about memorialization and the imagined community of the nation, flagging intersections between Cold War and migration history. Screens, designed to provoke inquiry into the perception and representation of migrants, occupied central positions in the exhibition. The staging of migration memories in Projekt Migration was inspired by exhibition practices, where a visit to an art show is often reminiscent of a

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multiplex movie theater in which the audience is allowed to circulate freely between several projection screens. The transparency of the screens corresponded to the intended visibility of the apparatus, exposing conventionalized modes of representation and viewing positions. The archive was temporarily staged and opened for visitors. History had to be constituted from an abundance of fragments and documents. The incorporation of viewers into screens becomes apparent in pictures documenting the exhibition. One photograph shows two visitors to the exhibition against a photograph from the 1960s, depicting people in the Cologne railway station,26 that had been printed on a large transparent screen hanging in the exhibition space. The shadows of the spectators are thus superimposed onto the screen and create a new assemblage of merging temporalities between the 1960s and 2005. The subjects of the old photograph and the spectators of the new installation are both reading documents on the wall. This parallel mirroring and layered structure of the picture emblematically capture dynamic participation and interactive access, major goals not only for museums and galleries but also for teaching history today. The artwork and documents shown on various projection screens and monitors at multiple venues included a video recording of Joseph Beuys’s 1972 performance “Ausfegen,” showing him sweeping Karl-Marx-Platz in West Berlin after a 1 May demonstration, together with two foreign students. The artist thus aligns himself with the figure of the migrant worker who cleans the stage after speeches have been delivered and festivities are over. Another installation by Viennese filmmaker Gustav Deutsch featured an extensive archive of clips from Tatort, Germany’s most popular television program, a crime show. Tatort Migration was presented in a room with ten cubicles, each with a red sofa. Spectators could circulate between these open living rooms and watch looping clip compilations devoted to particular themes such as “Menschenfracht” (human trafficking), “Melange der Liebe” (mix of love), or “Ein Lied sagt mehr als 1000 Worte” (a song says more than a thousand words). This archive of clips opened up a transnational perspective on the show and impressively demonstrated the central role of actors and characters from elsewhere at the core of German popular culture. One could imagine this installation shown at a busy transit point such as the main station, where it would certainly attract more attention than it did during its temporary installation at Hahnentor in Cologne. Incidentally, very few people in Berlin heard about the exhibition Projekt Migration. The memorialization of migration speaks to the nation but rarely resonates beyond localized initiatives. The cinema at the Kölnischer Kunstverein was also part of the exhibition and featured a looping projection of a short video entitled “Door” by Ene-Liis Semper, an eerie repetition of threshold images. While visitors could engage with moving images everywhere throughout the show, the

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cinema as an empty space where visitors only peeked in occasionally showcased changing modes of reception: spectators today are no longer immobilized in a dark movie theater, overwhelmed by the apparatus; they can circulate and pick and choose between multiple screens. Nonetheless, cinema is still alive. Outside exhibition hours, Projekt Migration featured multiple film programs and panel discussions in this cinema. As curator of one of these special programs, I decided to open with R. W. Fassbinder’s classic Angst essen Seele auf (literally, fear eats the soul, translated as Ali: Fear Eats the Soul, 1974) and the short homage Angst isst Seele auf (2003) by Shahbaz Noshir, once again with actress Brigitte Mira.27 The program also included panel discussions with directors Hatice Ayten, Hussi Kutlucan, Angelina Maccarone, Yüksel Yavuz and Claudia Tronnier, the commissioning editor of “Das kleine Fernsehspiel” at the second German public broadcasting channel ZDF, an important platform for productions by young auteurs with migrant backgrounds. Schwarzfahrer and Propaganda — the films discussed in the next two sections — were also shown as part of this program.28

Convergence without Tangency A low-budget short black-and-white film shot in Berlin unexpectedly hit German news programs in March 1993. In the same year that Steven Spielberg was honored for Schindler’s List, the German director Pepe Danquardt also received an Academy Award for his short live-action film titled Schwarzfahrer. The film presents twelve minutes of German society, literally in transit on a streetcar, and encapsulates disjunctures within a unified Germany. Schwarzfahrer is one of the few early post-Wall films that stages encounters in unified Germany, specifically Berlin, with an eye for migration and racialization. The opening aerial shot of two trains approaching and passing each other from opposite directions is discretely accompanied by a synthetic drumming sound by Michel Seigner. This symbolic image of convergence without tangency signals a commentary on the state of the nation at a time of monumental construction sites, including those that are gradually reconnecting interrupted transportation networks. Slowly, the camera pans to the left, following one of the trains. The next shot is taken from street-level. At the cue of a saxophone tune, a man dives up into the frame from below, while an elevated train is passing in the background. He emerges disgruntled from his failed attempts to start an old Triumph-brand motorcycle, thick-frame glasses and an old-fashioned helmet underscoring his retro appearance. To his right, the TV tower on Alexanderplatz rises into the frame, unmistakably localizing the setting in central (formerly East) Berlin. The train enters Alexanderplatz Station, where crowds of people are gliding past each other on escalators, echoing

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the earlier image of two trains passing by each other. Meanwhile, the impeded motorcyclist has given up. Perspiring heavily, he reaches a streetcar, takes a back seat, and starts reading the paper — possibly studying job postings. At the streetcar stop, two young men are listening to loud music from a boom box — music that the credits identify as the song “Keep All the Sunshine (Locked up)” by the Snow Blind Twilight Ferries, a band named after a line from a Dylan Thomas poem. The two young men are seen laughing and chatting animatedly, but their conversation remains inaudible. One of them is wearing an embroidered baseball cap in reverse. He parts from his friend, boards the same streetcar as the motorcyclist, and heads for a free seat next to an old woman, who disparagingly eyeballs him, clearly disapproving of his dark skin. He takes the seat nonetheless; she gathers her coat, drops her handbag, picks it up, and falls into an angry rant. Claiming the transient vehicle of mass transportation as her indigenous territory that is threatened by invasion, she acts somewhat like the passengers in a railway compartment who claim this transient space as their own and regard newcomers as unwelcome invaders, as described by Hans Magnus Enzensberger.29 As the streetcar moves across central Berlin, the old woman voices her exasperation: “Why are you all coming here? Has anyone invited you? We managed on our own. We don’t need any Hottentots who are living off our backs! Now, when so many of our own are unemployed. These foreigners are all working illegally, too. As if anyone could control them, one looks like the other!”30 The other travelers are staring apathetically, their faces devoid of any reaction. At a stop, an oncoming train is waiting. For a moment, the young man exchanges gazes through the window with a young man in the other train. Both of them look tired and burnt-out, like a black-and-white mirror image of each other. Then the two trains depart in opposite directions — once again a moment of convergence without tangency. The old woman continues her rant: “As if Italians and Turks weren’t enough already! Now half of Africa is coming here, too!” At this point, a young Turk who is in the back of the car with a friend, both flirting with a couple of girls, feels provoked to respond. In Turkish, without subtitles — as if to expose the incomprehension of the fellow travelers as well as the audience — he raises the only voice against the claimed birthright of the native and utters a curse: “Yeter, lan, bu karı. Ag˘ zını siktiriyim horospusuna bak, lan. Ne dedig˘ ini bilmiyor ya.” (That’s enough now, man! Look at the old whore, fuck her mouth, man! She doesn’t know what she is saying!) The insertion of this foreign language into the common space brings a moment of disruption, but not enough to reverse the flow. The woman continues unflinchingly: “If things go on like this there will be nothing but Turks, Poles, and Niggers here before too long. We hardly know anymore which country we are living in. . . . They are breed-

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ing like rabbits down there — all in a wild mess.” The embarassing tirade of ventriloquized hate speech culminates in a multiple echo of this “wild mess.” The climax in sound is visually underscored by a montage of closeups of the eyes and ears of the travelers. The ear-piercing voice of the old woman penetrates like glue, potentially melding the isolated sense organs into one community. Meanwhile, the lack of reaction from the passengers makes the spectator wonder whether their silence is due to approval or callousness. The old lady’s resentment was indeed a common attitude in both East and West Germany before 1989 and is thus part of the shared inheritance of the Berlin Republic. The end of the Cold War brought an increase in migration to Germany with growing numbers of civil-war refugees seeking asylum and ethnic Germans repatriated from Poland, Romania, and the former Soviet Union. Anxieties about floods of foreigners eventually culminated in the so-called “asylum compromise” of the Helmut Kohl government, a change of the Basic Law, and the curtailing of asylum legislation, which went into effect on 1 July 1993. Echoes of the asylum debates are clearly discernable in the nativist tirade of the woman. She voices resentments that tended to be taboo in the official language of the GDR. The first contract workers from Vietnam arrived in the GDR in 1973, and others followed from Algeria and Mozambique. The rhetoric of solidarity with “socialist friends” from “brother countries” — celebrated at solidarity festivals and propagated in contrast to the exploitation of “guest workers” by the “capitalist West” — did not, of course, reflect real living conditions.31 Contract workers were treated as a temporary labor force and mostly housed in residential accommodations, isolated from the population. The latent resentment that had previously been supressed for fear of the state erupted after the fall of the Wall in violent arson attacks on residences of asylum seekers and contract workers in Hoyerswerda (September 1991) and Rostock-Lichtenhagen (August 1992).32 Arson attacks in other cities, including in West Germany, followed. On 23 November 1992, neo-Nazis burned down a Turkish family’s home in Mölln, where two girls and a woman died in the fire. On 29 May 1993, three girls and two women died in an arson attack on the house of a Turkish family in Solingen. In an essay published in 1993, the poet May Ayim summed up concerns about the rise of xenophobia that accompanied the renationalization of public debate and sentiment in the years after the fall of the Wall: “Like other Black Germans and immigrants, I knew that even a German passport did not constitute an invitation to the East-West festivities. . . . The new ‘we’ in ‘this country of ours’ — as Chancellor Kohl loved to say — did not and does not have room for everyone.”33 A “new wall” of racism seemed to have arisen.34 The actress Senta Moira, who plays the old woman in the film Schwarzfahrer, is not a former GDR citizen but is from West Berlin. She is

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also known for the role of a sympathetic neighbor in Hussi Kutlucan’s Ich Chef, Du Turnschuh (Me boss, you sneaker, 1998),35 an “anarchic comedy,” akin in spirit to the Marx Brothers’s Monkey Business (1931), set on the construction site around the Reichstag.36 Thus, although the scene is set in the eastern part of Berlin, her character in Schwarzfahrer is likely designed as a West Berliner, traversing the East on a streetcar. Strictly speaking, she is herself in foreign territory here, and perhaps it is that outsider position that makes her a mouthpiece for hostility that the other passengers do not dare to voice. The bonds of community that she proclaims in her utterance of “we” are still young and anything but stable. The line “We managed on our own” resonates ironically with regard to postwar history in West and East Germany, a history that is unthinkable on both sides without foreign economic aid and transnational labor migration. Whether this irony enters the consciousness of her fellow travelers remains unknown. The turning point in the film occurs when the conductor enters the streetcar to check tickets. The young black man, the object of the woman’s insults who sat through the entire hateful tirade without a word, quickly snatches her ticket, puts it into his mouth, and chews and swallows it. He then presents his pass to the conductor with a knowing side glance at the woman, thus establishing with one glimpse a complicit understanding between himself and the benevolent authority figure while turning the woman into the object of pitiful ridicule. Paul Outlaw gives a shrewd performance in this silent role. The effect of the film and its success as an original response to racist ostracism lie in this unexpected turn of liberating humor. The woman, who is left without a ticket to show, has to disembark with the conductor. The streetcar continues on its way without her. The real fare dodger, the man with the old-fashioned motorcyle helmet, who would have been fined as well, thus goes unnoticed and gestures gleefully through the window as the streetcar departs. The camera stays behind, and leaves the spectator wondering where the streetcar is going and whether the silent passengers — as well as the spectators of the film — might now engage in a conversation. Schwarzfahrer disrupts common representations of East-West encounters in unified Germany. The “Africans” and “Turks” are traveling together through the new center of Berlin. Their presence calls into question the German-German alliances in native territorialism. The comical counterattack against ranting racism echoes the spirit of quick-witted cyber-guerilla interventions of the transethnic activist network Kanak Attak.37 The gratification that the audience feels in the face of the eaten ticket and subsequent removal of the old woman from the train suggest the hope that the majority population will eventually accept “strangers” as driving forces of mobility — even if media representations hitherto have rarely depicted

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intersections between the East-West axis and the South-North axis of social intercourse.38 Schwarzfahrer did not prevent real occurrences of violence in the vicinity of Berlin. Half a year after the film was awarded an Oscar, on 17 September 1994, the Ghanaian Martin Agyare was found unconscious with serious injuries on the rail tracks to Oranienburg in the north of Berlin. He had been stabbed, his skull was fractured, and both his left lower leg and two of his fingers had to be amputated. According to his testimony, six skinheads had insulted, beaten, and stabbed him, and finally pushed him out of the train. About fifteen other passengers in the compartment had allegedly witnessed the attack without intervening. The perpetrators were never found, and the case was closed in 1996. In November 1997, Agyare was attacked on a train once again. A group of fans of the Berlin soccer club Hertha BSC, spitting and shouting racial slurs such as “Nigger Out” and “Germany for the Germans,” encircled him, and one of them hit him in the face with a fist.39 In light of such attacks, the solution rehearsed in Schwarzfahrer may seem naive. Xenophobia and hate speech are embodied in an easy target for our scorn, a caricature of a jittery old woman, and the spectator is gratified by her removal from the train (and from the future of the unified nation). The film exposes the absurdity of territorial battles in a mobile vehicle of mass transportation — a transient abode for all passengers.

Tracing the Wall in Turkish Cinema Is the young Turk who talks back in Turkish in the streetcar in Schwarzfahrer, or the director of this film, aware of forerunners and similar interventions? Turkish Berlin texts have a longer history of engaging with the divided city and claiming a place within it, demonstrating the correlation of migration and national identity as two-way rather than one-way traffic. Over the past few years, Turkish German cinema has enjoyed quite a breakthrough and international visibility in the international festival circuit, most prominently with Fatih Akın’s award-winning films Gegen die Wand (Against the wall; English title, Head-On, 2004) and Auf der anderen Seite (On the other side; English title, The Edge of Heaven, 2007).40 Thanks to these and other films, the discussion of “migrant and diasporic cinema” has opened up to a comparative, transnational, European horizon.41 Meanwhile, earlier films produced in Turkey have remained largely absent from the monolingual nation-bound narrative and visual archive that inform discussions about the transformation of cityscape and the presence of migrants in German society. In retrospect, Berlin scenes from earlier films that make a reappearance on YouTube and other digital

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platforms are worth reviewing, as they acquire a documentary quality, showing locations in the cityscape that no longer exist, namely the Wall from a migrant perspective. In Almanya Acı Vatan (Deutschland bittere Heimat; Germany bitter homeland, 1979),42 which in one scene ironically gathers the Turkish community from Kreuzberg in front of the then unused Reichstag building for a ceremony where one migrant is awarded the medal for the best garbage collector; he delivers a speech in Turkish, stating that he will go back to Turkey to die — a remark that the interpreter refuses to translate into German. Director S¸erif Gören’s subsequent film, Polizei, a uniform comedy about the street cleaner Ali Ekber (played by popular comedian Kemal Sunal) posing as a German police officer, was shot in Berlin-Kreuzberg in 1988 and once again presents “Berlinistan” in an ironic light. Ali’s father promenades the neighborhood, showing off the Wall as a local site to a visitor from the village back in Turkey (who in turn appears quietly interested in seeing one of the “sex shops” he has heard about): “Bir gecede yaptılar bu duvarı. S¸u ortası var ya, mayınlı, hep asker dolu. Yaa, kaçmak çok zor!” (They built this Wall in one night. The middle there is full of mines and soldiers. Yes, it’s very difficult to escape!) Watching this scene of Wall tourism today reactivates memories of the famous observation towers that tourists in West-Berlin would climb to take a peek across the Iron Curtain. Although this retired Gastarbeiter keeps reiterating his longing for his homeland back in Turkey, it is obvious that he has also made himself at home in the divided city. As he looks across the Wall, he exclaims that he can smell his homeland soil — a claim of territorial identification that acquires an ambivalent significance considering its location of utterance. While playing with German authority roles by explicitly referencing the popular German figure of the Mayor of Koepenick, the paradigmatic impostor in uniform, this comedy also targets hypocrisy in self-imaginings among the Turkish community, and demonstrates that there is no stable homeland culture to return to and rely on. Polizei circulated primarily as a videocassette among Turks living in Germany, and is remembered only by a Turkish audience today. In fact, the screening planned within the film program at Projekt Migration at the Kölnischer Kunstverein in Cologne could not be realized, because no subtitled copy of the film could be located.43 Instead we chose to show a more recent uniform and border comedy, Propaganda, by Sinan Çetin, a popular Turkish production from 1999, once again featuring the comedian Kemal Sunal, a Turkish enactment of Charlie Chaplin’s “Tramp,” who starred in eighty-two films between 1972 and 1999 and has remained a popular icon in Turkey beyond his death in 2000.44 In resonance with these earlier stagings of the Berlin Wall, the border running through a village in south-eastern Turkey in Propaganda serves as a stand-in for the Berlin Wall and borders in general.45 Kemal Sunal plays

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a customs officer dispatched from the capital Ankara to his native village somewhere near Syria in 1948. The authority figure in uniform arrives on a train and is welcomed with fanfare. Massive rolls of barbed wire are unloaded from the train and a border is installed, which turns out to run right through the village, leaving some houses off-limits. The house of the customs officer’s best friend (played by Metin Akpinar, another popular comedian, familiar from television), the village doctor, and his wife, the teacher, are now located in foreign lands. Director Sinan Çetin who is known for his racy style acquired in shooting commercials, had already produced the somewhat scandalous box office hit Berlin in Berlin (1993), a reverse asylum scenario that traps a German photographer in the home of an extended Turkish family in the Berlin neighborhood of Kreuzberg.46 In Propaganda, the border that dissects the village community is decided in the faraway capital Ankara. The rulings of the nation-state do not make sense in this local setting. Somewhat comparable to the beer-drinking Kreuzbergers in Herr Lehmann who watch the fall of the Wall on television with detached indifference, the village community in Propaganda observes the borderopening ceremony with puzzled bewilderment. There is no ethnic segregation within the community, no visible marks of difference that would justify partition. This foregrounds the arbitrary and absurd quality of the border, underpinned cinematically by high- and low-angle shots and slow-motion sequences. The distinction between inside and outside is problematized, and the barrier is subverted by anarchic performance. After the first bullet has been fired at the border, the radio reports that Soviet occupation forces are controlling access to Berlin and apprehensions have arisen that this might result in a division between East and West (referencing the Berlin Blockade 1948–49, which led to the Airlift). The speaker cites the rhetoric of protecting socialism against the capitalist venture of the Marshall Plan. This short insert transmitted through the radio signals that such absurd separations of a community are simultaneously taking place elsewhere in the world. It also implies that there is no articulation of the local that is not inherently connected with global issues. The watchtowers erected on this border are clearly reminiscent of the towers along the Wall. The film ends with a dramatic scene of border breaking. The repentant customs officer joins with the outlanders in a dramatic truck drive right through the border pole, waving the flag. The custom officer strips off the uniform that is a symbol of his authority, citizens who were left outside are brought back in, and the absurdity of state policy and any reliance on clearcut separations between inside and outside are exposed. Perhaps this imaginary act of border breaking and repatriation was inspired by the historic events known as the fall of the Berlin Wall; however, the staging of arbitrariness of state borders opens up the horizon beyond one Volk stand-

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ing united to a universalizing comparison with borders and partitions on a global scale.47 By occupying German places of memory with performative wit, speaking in Turkish at German sites, or referencing the Berlin Wall from afar to stage other kinds of walls, the films Almanya Acı Vatan, Polizei, and Propaganda bring unfulfilled ironic potential to the naval-gazing territorial thinking in the commemoration of German unification. The fact that such material is unknown to the mainstream German audience suggests that despite political relations, economic cooperation, and transnational family ties between Germany and Turkey, imaginaries of social cohesion — past, present, and future — still tend to be confined within the limitations of nation-state monolingualism.48 Borders are still in place, and mobility remains restricted.49 The exhibition Projekt Migration opened up the archive of German postwar and post-Wall history from the angle of migration and engaged spectators in putting together their own history by circulating among a variety of screens, juxtaposing and bringing into conversation a range of sounds, words, and images. Such a fragmentary and heterogeneous assemblage where spectators have to keep reframing and refracturing images is symptomatic for the mediated virtuality with which we access the past today, as readers of documents on the Internet and viewers of film clips on YouTube. Exhibitions tend to be temporary and localized; hence the potential of the combinatory, multimedial vision proposed by Projekt Migration remains yet to be realized and staged in new configurations — perhaps this is a more appropriate approach to the topic of migration than any static museum could ever offer. Similarly, what Germanness might mean twenty years after the fall of the Wall is equally a project under construction, relying on screens, projections, and participatory spectators. After all, there are always limits to convergence, and interruptions are imperative for any imagination of unity.

Notes 1

Leander Hausmann, Herr Lehmann (Germany: Delphi, 2003). Arjun Appadurai, “The Production of Locality,” in Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1996), 178. 3 “Tabak ohne Tamilen,” Der Spiegel, 20 Aug. 1990, 167–68. 4 Aras Ören, Berlin Savignyplatz: Auf der Suche nach der Gegenwart V, trans. Deniz Göktürk (Berlin: Elefanten Press, 1995), 154. 5 Pepe Danquardt, Schwarzfahrer (Germany: Trans-Film, 1993); Sinan Çetin, Berlin in Berlin (Turkey, Germany: Plato Film, 1993). 6 See Der Bevölkerung: Kunstwerk im nördlichen Lichthof des Reichstagsgebäudes website, accessed 14 Jan. 2011, http://www.bundestag.de/kulturundgeschichte/ 2

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kunst/kuenstler/haacke/derbevoelkerung. The quote by Bertolt Brecht reads: “Wer in unserer Zeit statt Volk Bevölkerung . . . sagt, unterstützt schon viele Lügen nicht. Er nimmt den Wörtern ihre faule Mystik.” (Those who in our times say population rather than Volk already refute many lies. They eliminate the foul mysticism of the word.) Bertolt Brecht, Gesammelte Werke: Schriften zur Literatur und Kunst, Vol. 18 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1977), 231. 7 Anil Bhatti, “Heterogeneität, Homogenität, Ähnlichkeit,” in Kulturwissenschaften in Europa — ein grenzüberschreitende Disziplin?, ed. Andrea Allerkamp and Gérard Raulet (Münster: Westfälisches Dampfboot, 2010), 250–66. 8 I am alluding here to the title of our documentation of fifty years of debates on migration: Deniz Göktürk, David Gramling, and Anton Kaes, eds., Germany in Transit: Nation and Migration, 1955–2005 (Berkeley: U of California P, 2007). 9 Nevim Çil, “Türkische Migranten und der Mauerfall,” in Aus Politik und Zeitgeschichte, 21–22 (2009), accessed 14 Jan. 2011, http://www.bpb.de/ publikationen/52CFRX.html. Also in Transit Deutschland: Debatten zu Nation und Migration, ed. Deniz Göktürk, David Gramling, Anton Kaes, and Andreas Langenohl (Konstanz: Konstanz UP/Fink Verlag, 2011), 139–41. See also Nevim Çil, Topographie des Außenseiters: Türkische Generationen und der deutsch-deutsche Wieder vereinigungsprozess (Berlin: Verlag Hans Schiler, 2007). 10 Çil quotes a young man whom she interviewed, Oktay T.: “Irgendwie dachte ich, das ist jetzt ihr Fest, ihre Feier, sollen sie genießen. Also ich wollte da eher bisschen abseits bleiben.” (Somehow I thought, this is now their celebration, their party, they should enjoy it. I wanted to stay a bit off to the side.) 11 These questions are poignantly addressed in Jan Motte and Rainer Ohliger, eds., Geschichte und Gedächtnis in der Einwanderungsgesellschaft: Migration zwischen historischer Rekonstruktion und Erinnerungspolitik (Essen: Klartext, 2004). The cover image of the book, showing a Turkish man carrying a sign “Wir sind auch das Volk!” (We, too, are the people!) at a 1990 demonstration in front of the Gedächtniskirche in Berlin, is a case in point. 12 Andreas Huyssen, “Nation, Race, and Immigration: German Identities after Unification,” in Twilight Memories: Marking Time in a Culture of Amnesia (London: Routledge, 1995), 67–84. 13 Die tageszeitung (taz) interview with Hans-Ulrich Wehler, “Muslims Cannot be Integrated,” in Göktürk, Gramling, and Kaes, Germany in Transit, 223–26. 14 Zafer S¸enocak and Karin Yes¸ilada, “Darf man Türken und Juden vergleichen, Herr S¸enocak?,” interview, Der Tagesspiegel, 13/14 Apr. 1995. Also in Göktürk, Gramling, Kaes, and Langenohl, Transit Deutschland, 449–52. 15 Zafer S¸enocak, Gefährliche Verwandtschaft (Munich: Babel, 1998). In English, Perilous Kinship, trans. Tom Cheesman (Swansea, UK: Hafan Books, 2009). Available for download and print to order from http://stores.lulu.com/hafan. For an analysis of the novel see Leslie A. Adelson, “Genocide and Taboo,” in The Turkish Turn in Contemporary Germany Literature: Toward a New Critical Grammar of Migration (New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 79–122.

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Leslie A. Adelson, “Touching Tales of Turks, Germans, and Jews: Cultural Alterity, Historical Narrative, and Literary Riddles for the 1990s,” special issue on the Holocaust, New German Critique 80 (Spring-Summer 2000): 93–124. 17 Motte and Ohliger, Geschichte und Gedächtnis in der Einwanderungsgesellschaft. 18 Viola B. Georgi, Entliehene Erinnerung: Geschichtsbilder junger Migranten in Deutschland (Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 2003). On memory debates between a Turkish German historian and young visitors at Berlin’s Jewish Museum see also Özlem Topçu and Heinrich Wefing, “Bist du Jude?,” Die Zeit, 21 Jan. 2010. Also in Göktürk, Gramling, Kaes, and Langenohl, Transit Deutschland, 428–32. 19 See also the introduction to Göktürk, Gramling, Kaes, and Langenohl, Transit Deutschland, for a discussion of these questions. 20 See Condoleezza Rice and Philip D. Zelikow, Germany Unified and Europe Transformed: A Study in Statecraft (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1997). 21 Etienne Balibar, “Europe as Borderland,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 27 (2009): 190–215. Further references to this work are given in the text using the abbreviation EB. See also Etienne Balibar, “The Borders of Europe,” in Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling beyond the Nation, ed. Pheng Cheah and Bruce Robbins and trans. J. Swenson, 216–29 (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1998); Transit Migration Forschungsgruppe, eds., Turbulente Ränder: Neue Perspektiven auf Migration an den Grenzen Europas (Bielefeld: transcript Verlag, 2007). 22 Yasemin N. Soysal, “Locating Europe,” European Societies 4, no. 3 (2002): 265–84. 23 Göktürk, Gramling, and Kaes, Germany in Transit, 27–28. 24 Kölnischer Kunstverein; Dokumentationszentrum und Museum über die Migration in Deutschland e.V., DOMiD; Institut für Kulturanthropologie der Universität Frankfurt am Main; Institut für Theorie der Gestaltung und Kunst, HGK Zürich, eds, Projekt Migration (Cologne: DuMont Literatur und Kunst Verlag, 2005). A review of the exhibition describes this installation as a fitting prologue to a show that proposes to look at “history from the perspective of migration movements, rather from that of nation states.” Katrin Bettina Müller, “Project Migration,” accessed 4 May 2009, http://www.signandsight.com/features/424. html. Originally in tageszeitung, 7 Oct. 2005. For more reviews of the exhibition see http://www.domit.de/seiten/resonanz/re_projekt_migration/re_projekt_ migration-en.html (accessed 4 May 2009). For a critical analysis of the exhibition, see Barbara Wolbert, “‘Studio of Realism’: On the Need for Art Exhibitions on Migration History,” Forum: Qualitative Social Research 11, no. 2, art. 34 (May 2010), http://www.qualitative-research.net/index.php/fqs/article/view/1483. 25 See http://www.domid.org/seiten/ausstellungen/ausstellungen-de.html. 26 The photograph evokes a passage from John Berger and Jean Mohr’s classic photo essay about migrants in Europe: “Migrant workers, already living in the metropolis, have the habit of visiting the main railway station. To talk in groups there, to watch the trains come in, to receive first-hand news from their country,

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to anticipate the day when they will begin the return journey.” John Berger and John Mohr, A Seventh Man: The Story of a Migrant Worker in Europe (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1975), 64. 27 R. W.Fassbinder, Angst essen Seele auf (Germany: Tango Film Productions, 1974); Shahbaz Noshir, Angst isst Seele auf (Germany: Yılmaz Arslan, 2003). 28 For the full program of the film program see the Projekt Migration catalogue. 29 Hans Magnus Enzensberger, Die große Wanderung (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1992), 11–12. Hans Magnus Enzensberger, “The Great Migration,” in Civil Wars: From L.A to Bosnia, trans. Piers Spence and Martin Chalmers (New York: New Press, 1994), 105. 30 This is my translation of this monologue, as the subtitles do not capture all nuances. 31 Göktürk, Gramling, and Kaes, Germany in Transit, 65–104. 32 Jan C. Behrends, Thomas Lindenberger, and Patrice G. Poutrus, eds., Fremde und Fremd-Sein in der DDR: Zu historischen Ursachen der Fremdenfeindlichkeit in Ostdeutschland (Berlin: Metropol Verlag, 2003). 33 May Ayim, “The Year 1990: Homeland and Unity from an Afro-German Perspective,” in Göktürk, Gramling, and Kaes, Germany in Transit, 126–29. 34 Caroline Fetscher, “Die neue Mauer,” Tagesspiegel, 30 Jul. 2000. Also in Göktürk, Gramling, Kaes, and Langenohl, Germany in Transit, 138–40. On xenophobia and right-wing extremism see also Wilhelm Heitmeyer, ed. Deutsch-deutsche Zustände: 20 Jahre nach dem Mauerfall (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2009). Hito Steyerl’s essay film Die leere Mitte (The Empty Center, Germany, 1998), a multilayered archeology of Potsdamer Platz, which merges documentary footage of the construction site with archival materials, comes to similar conclusions. 35 Hussi Kutlucan, Ich Chef, Du Turnschuh (Germany: Zweites Deutsches Fernsehen (ZDF), 1998). 36 Deniz Göktürk, “Strangers in Disguise: Role Play beyond Identity Politics in Anarchic Film Comedy,” in “Multicultural Germany: Art, Performance and Media,” ed. Deniz Göktürk and Barbara Wolbert, special issue, New German Critique 92 (Spring/Summer 2004): 100–122. 37 See their website, accessed 14 Jan. 2011, http://www.kanak-attak.de. For a detailed analysis of their activist media practices see Deniz Göktürk, “Postcolonial Amnesia? Taboo Memories and Kanaks with Cameras,” in German Colonialism, Visual Culture, and Modern Memory, ed. Volker Langbehn (London: Routledge, 2009), 278–301. 38 Schwarzfahrer is used in educational settings internationally. A Swiss catalogue of films for teaching and adult education titled “Films for One World” offers the film on a DVD titled “Respect Not Racism.” In the United States the film is available on a DVD compilation of short films. Short 1: Invention. Warner Home Video 1999. The film is also streamed online: http://video.google.com/videoplay? docid=2103841859203199562# and http://www.youtube.com/watch?v= XFQXcv1k9OM.

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Andrea Böhm, “Rechte Schläger auf der Anklagebank: Einmal mehr wurde die S-Bahn zum Tatort,” die tageszeitung, 24 Dec. 1997. 40 Fatih Akın, Auf der anderen Seite (Germany, Turkey, Italy: Anka Film, Corazón International, Dorje Film, Norddeutscher Rundfunk, 2007), and Gegen die Wand (Germany, Turkey: Arte, Bavaria Film International, Corazón International, 2004). 41 Daniela Berghahn, and Claudia Sternberg, eds., European Migrant Cinema in Motion: Migrant and Diasporic Cinema in Contemporary Europe (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010). See also: Deniz Göktürk, “Verstöße gegen das Reinheitsgebot: Migrantenkino zwischen wehleidiger Pflichtübung und wechselseitigem Grenzverkehr,” in Globalkolorit: Multikulturalismus und Populärkultur, ed. Ruth Mayer and Mark Terkessidis (St. Andrä-Wördern, Austria: Hannibal, 1998), 99–114. See also Tim Bergfelder, Erica Carter, and Deniz Göktürk, eds., The German Cinema Book (London: BFI, 2002). See in particular “V. Transnational Connections,” 211–56. 42 S¸erif Gören, Almanya Acı Vatan (Turkey, East Germany: Güls¸ah Release, 1979). 43 In 2008 the entire film was uploaded to YouTube, accessed 14 Jan. 2011, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qeh3GdcnOUw. This suggests that digital media create new platforms and enable spectators to put old media content into new networks of circulation. 44 Sinan Çetin, Propaganda (Turkey: Plato Film, 1999). Sunal also wrote a masters thesis, which has been published as a book, reviewing his acting career and investigating the reasons for his own popularity. Kemal Sunal, TV ve Sinemada Kemal Sunal Güldürüsü (Istanbul: Sel Yayıncılık, 2005). 45 The film ranks nineteenth among the most successful Turkish films screened in Germany, with 176.823 viewers. See Inside Kino website, accessed 14 Jan. 2011, http://www.insidekino.de/DJahr/DTurkey.htm. It was also awarded a prize at the Shanghai Film Festival. 46 Deniz Göktürk, “Turkish delight — German Fright: Migrant Identities in Transnational Cinemas,” working paper for the ESRC Transnational Communities Research Programme, also accessible at www.transcomm.ox.ac.uk. Also in Mapping the Margins: Identity Politics and the Media, ed. Deniz Derman, Brenda Dervin, and Karen Ross, 177–92 (Creskill, NJ: Hampton Press, 2003). 47 Ghislaine Glasson Deschaumes, and Rada Ivekovic´, eds., Divided Countries, Separated Cities: The Modern Legacy of Partition (New Delhi: Oxford UP, 2003). 48 David Gramling, “The New Cosmopolitan Monolingualism: Linguistic Citizenship in Twenty-First Century Germany,” Die Unterrichtspraxis / Teaching German 42, no. 2 (2009): 130–40. 49 In 2010, while Istanbul was being celebrated as one of Europe’s Capitals of Culture and drew almost as many tourists as London and Paris, a visa from the German embassy in Istanbul for a Turkish citizen to visit Germany remained hard to obtain, not to mention the difficulties faced by travelers who are trying to get to Europe from North African countries.

6: Beyond the Wall: Reunifying Berlin Kathleen James-Chakraborty

F

Berlin was a battlefield. The violent suppression of the Spartacist uprising and the street fights of the early 1930s bracketed the Weimar Republic. The Soviet invasion of 1945 and the quelling of the revolt of 1953 followed. During the rest of the Cold War the major battles were no longer military but ideological. Architecture and urbanism served as ideal means for expressing the apparent superiority of one political system over another in areas such as the provision of housing, the maintenance of historical monuments, and the establishment of thriving civic institutions. Rather than resulting in a clear-cut victory, however, the fall of the Berlin Wall brought a new round of skirmishes. East and West Berliners, joined by those from around the world interested in architecture and urbanism or concerned about the identity of the newly reunited county, debated the best way of reconstructing the heart of the city and repairing the slash the wall had cut through it. The hope was that Europe’s largest construction site would create the paradigmatic urban architecture of its day, that Berlin of the 1990s would join the Paris of Napoleon III, the Isfahan of Shah Abbas, or the Rome of Sixtus V as one of the most significant chapters in the history of architecture and urban planning. In fact, the results were far more mixed. Contemporary Berlin is lively rather than beautiful. The reams of newsprint, volumes of architecture magazines, years of meetings, and millions of Internet hits did bear significant fruit. First, they provided an effective forum in which Berliners, other Germans, and foreigners could discuss by proxy their concerns about the character of a reunited Germany. Second, they transformed contemporary architectural culture, not by providing the expected icons, although several of these did emerge, but by radically altering the terms of the discussion. When a revived neo-modernism eventually trumped postmodernism with both politicians and the public, the international architectural establishment was forced away from historical quotation and toward the abstract evocation of memory as the most effective way of responding to the palimpsest of Berlin’s many layered political and architectural past.1 The banality of the “critical reconstruction,” a term to be explained in OR MUCH OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY

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detail below, of Berlin Mitte sounded the death knell for postmodern historicism in avant-garde circles, while the struggles of star architects to address Berlin and modernism’s intertwined pasts placed memory for the first time at the center of modernist formal experiments.2 The debates over the city’s architectural identity were central to the construction of a new national identity for what is now known as the Berlin Republic. Although all of the participants were committed to parliamentary democracy, the creation of new symbols for that democracy was extremely contentious. The debates over the city’s appearance were so intense precisely because the outcome was understood to communicate so much, and the associations of particular forms and precedents remained a matter of considerable dispute. Did neoclassicism entail the rule of law, invoke the Enlightenment creation of a bourgeois public sphere (or even the prosperity of the last years before the First World War), or did its association with authoritarianism irretrievably contaminate it? Did transparency communicate openness in government and celebrate the cultural experimentation of the Weimar Republic or was it just tawdry commercialism? Should decisions about Berlin’s architecture be negotiated at the grass roots level, entrusted to city or federal government officials, or be made by nationally prominent architects, inevitably trained and hitherto based in the west, or by talent imported from abroad? Berlin architecture and urbanism in the two decades following the fall of the Wall upended assumptions current in the late seventies and early eighties about both modernism and postmodernism. Postmodernism’s revival of symbolism, ornament, and often order had been widely understood to sound the death knell for modernist forms.3 Gone, too, supposedly was modernism’s focus on structure and industrial materials. Moreover, deconstructivism was ever further removed from modernism’s utopian aspirations than were those postmodernists attempting to reweave the social as well as the urban fabric.4 Deconstructivists repeatedly asserted that they were rejecting assumptions fundamental to architecture since the Enlightenment.5 Although literal historicism had already begun to fall from grace by the late 1980s, the utility of premodern precedents to urban design in particular was widely taken for granted. Two decades later, however, historicism was regarded once again as little more than kitsch. The world’s top architects universally favored abstraction and most also employed dynamic structural expression and new materials. Their buildings often aimed to engage a broad public unfamiliar with the sly allusions or overt historical quotations upon which an appreciation of postmodernist architecture generally depended.6 While it was unfolding, those engaged in the literal reshaping of the city mostly saw themselves as taking strong stylistic positions, which in turn were often understood to have political undertones. Whether or not one supported postmodern neoclassicism or Deconstruction and High

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Tech (the latest iterations of a resurgent modernism), one tended to castigate one’s opponents for naively hewing too closely to tainted precedents. These were typically castigated for being fascist in the case of neoclassicism or capitalist in the case of modernism (ironically, Communist architecture was rejected largely because it was seen as indistinguishable from that of its traditional enemies). Instead of rehashing these familiar arguments, I focus on the way in which the reconstruction of the center of the city changed the trajectory of contemporary architecture by transforming modernism, which I posit was itself steeped in precedent, away from its original futurist goals and into an instrument of memory. It was in Berlin, a city whose political battles had long had architectural repercussions and whose architecture had since the early nineteenth century helped establish paradigms with enormous international influence, that modernism was transformed by an engagement with the very past it had once so assiduously spurned. Here nearly a century of polarization between historicist and technological form was resolved in a compelling new way. This was not achieved, as in the past, by grafting classical order onto the latter, the solution chosen by Peter Behrens in the AEG Turbine factory of 1909 or by his former employee Ludwig Mies van der Rohe half a century later in the Neue Nationalgalerie. The defeat of postmodern historicism was achieved instead through recourse to symbolism and emotion, whose resonance within modernism had been largely suppressed even as they accounted for much of the movement’s original success.7 Moreover these were now harnessed in specific support of exactly what modernism was understood to reject: memory. The fruits of this journey from historicism to the revival of abstraction and from modernist orthodoxy to a flexible acceptance of expressionism and spectacle include many of contemporary Berlin’s new landmarks, most notably the Galleries Lafayette (Jean Nouvel, 1991–96), the Jewish Museum (Daniel Libeskind, 1989–99), and the dome of the Reichstag (Norman Foster, 1992–99). While analyses of “memory” in contemporary Germany generally focus on the Third Reich and the Holocaust, what was remarkable about these three examples was the diversity of memories they invoked, at times obliquely, at others quite insistently and openly. The architects of the new Berlin treated the frankly commercial architecture of the Weimar Republic and even failed Wilhelmine political institutions as legitimate sources for inspiration even as they optimistically reimagined them to serve new purposes. This mature modernism built upon memories not only of its own history but also of the earlier historicism it once sought so vigorously to overthrow. The breadth of the memories acknowledged ensures the appropriateness of modernism not only for this particular city, which played such a pivotal role in both the political and architectural history of the twentieth century, but also elsewhere. Finally, only

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through the redefinition of history as memory, with the greater scope this leap allows for personal emotion and imagination, could neo-modernism resolve the paradox at its core. The cultural resurgence of modern architecture was made possible by incorporating aspects of the vanquished. Throughout the twentieth century Germans associated architectural styles with political positions.8 Neoclassicism, for instance, was long discredited because of its adoption by first the Nazis and then the Communists, despite the fact that it was the eviction of Jewish tenants, the use of slave labor in stone quarries, and the treatment of construction workers rather than the style of buildings that closely resembled their counterparts in Paris and Washington that was morally flawed.9 Conversely, in first West but also eventually East Germany the revival of the New Building of the 1920s was equated by many with democracy, socialism, or both, although department stores and cinemas, as much as housing projects, had been important showcases for an architecture that was always commercial as well as utopian. As early as the 1980s activist architectural historians, motivated in part by the concern that Germany not be precluded from full participation in an increasingly un-ironic postmodernism, were challenging these correlations. The international turn toward the neoclassical principles of order exemplified by Berlin’s own Karl Friedrich Schinkel spurred reinterpretations of the classical underpinnings of modernist icons, such as Peter Behrens’s AEG Turbine Factory.10 A decade later scholarly attention turned to the degree to which modernists were not immune from collaboration with the Third Reich.11 That none of this scholarship proved able to uproot popular assumptions generated a number of paradoxes that called the easy equation of style with political position into question. The socialist Berlin government of a reunited Berlin consistently supported postmodern historicism, as in the reconstructed Liebermann and Sommer Houses on Pariserplatz flanking the Brandenburg Gate (Josef Paul Kleihues, 1992–99), while the Christian Democratic national government sponsored modernist memory in projects such the extension of the German Historical Museum (I. M. Pei, 2003). Berliners tended to side with the Kohl government on architectural issues, but this did not deter them from voting for the Social Democrats. Germany has unusually strict regulations on building. Hans Stimmann, who as the Berlin Senate’s building director from 1991 to 1996, the city’s State Secretary for Planning from 1996 to 1999, and its building director again from 1999 to 2006, was in control of the city’s planning apparatus for most of this period and supported what he termed “critical reconstruction.” This involved restoring the historic street network whenever possible, capping building heights, limiting the use of glass in facades, and ensuring a mix of uses by mandating the inclusion of apartments in office blocks. Above all, he sought to avoid the creation of an American style

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“downtown,” whose glazed skyscrapers he believed to be placeless. Stimmann and his allies, who included Fritz Neumeyer, the professor of architectural theory at the Technical University Berlin, and the architects Josef Paul Kleihues and Hans Kollhoff (all three of whom had taught at the architecture school in Dortmund, where Stimmann is now an honorary professor) believed in the importance of the local, which they defined in terms of the austere neoclassicism of Schinkel and Behrens, and of urban order in place of what they saw as market-driven chaos. They were convinced that neoclassicism’s basic principles were overtly humanist. That this aspect of the local happened to be extremely fashionable internationally at the time was hardly, of course, a deterrent. The supporters of critical reconstruction aimed to harness this chapter in the city’s history and to tame what they understood to be the corrosive influences of international capital by sponsoring the very best architecture of the day. This was a tall order, but they had good reason to believe they could pull it off. During the eighties Kleihues had led an International Building Exhibition (IBA) that had constructed belowmarket apartments that had simultaneously enticed a young educated middle class to remain in the city and attracted architecture pilgrims from as far away as Japan.12 Drawing upon the urban design principles of Rob Krier and Aldo Rossi, both of whom contributed to the IBA, Kleihues developed strict regulations regarding adherence to the street line and limited height, within which he set loose many of the world’s top architectural pedagogues and theorists, men who generally spent more time talking and writing about architecture than actually designing and building it. The results, many of them clustered just south of the Wall in Kreuzberg, where the edges of the old downtown frayed into a workingclass neighborhood populated largely by emigrants from Turkey and by student anarchists, were not always popular with neighbors, who preferred the provision of substantive social infrastructure such as daycare centers for children, but they dazzled visitors. Left largely unspoken was that this apparent capitalist showpiece was in fact heavily subsidized by the national and city governments. Because of the IBA’s resounding aesthetic success, expectations were from the beginning very high for the rebuilding of central Berlin, which was widely expected to become a major showpiece. It was taken for granted from the beginning that the world’s top architects would be involved. The only question was how free a hand to give them. But there the consensus ended. The loudest arguments mostly centered on buildings outside of Stimmann’s purview. The first major developments, a row of three mixed-use buildings on Friedrichstrasse and the reconstruction of Potsdamer Platz, were initiated before Stimmann’s regulations were put into place and before it was clear that the capital would return to the city. They were nonetheless designed largely within a framework informed by

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the earlier IBA. Another crucial design, Daniel Libeskind’s extension to the Berlin City Museum to house its Jewish collections, had been commissioned just before the fall of the Wall. Throughout the nineties Libeskind, who advocated radical disruption rather than the patient reweaving of the urban fabric, was the biggest thorn in Stimmann’s side. Meanwhile Helmut Kohl, chancellor from 1982 until 1998, and his cabinet made key decisions about the Neue Wache (New Guard) and the Zeughaus (Old Arsenal) on Unter den Linden as well as the Reichstag. The most visible site left to Stimmann was Pariserplatz, located at the end of Unter den Linden, and framed by the Brandenburg Gate. Nor were all the debates focused on new construction. The degree to which one could reuse buildings with checkered pasts was another crucial issue.13 East Berliners and their left of center allies repeatedly rallied to save the Palast der Republik (Palace of the Republic), a major Communist-era building that stood on the site of the demolished Hohenzollern Palace, for whose reconstruction others campaigned ardently, as described in more detail below. The shift of the capital to Berlin generated enormous publicity worldwide, most of it overwhelmingly positive, for Berlin’s new architecture but the bloom quickly faded from the rose.14 The Stimmann camp was startled to see how much of the excitement was about buildings erected in defiance of their regulations, while the foreigners who struggled to work within them often complained loudly and bitterly about what they saw as constrictions on artistic expression.15 Furthermore, the process catapulted no German into the international forefront of the profession. Instead, with those Germans loyal to modernism largely pushed aside, outsiders shaped a nation’s architectural identity to a degree that was unprecedented in modern Europe. On the civic side the Americans, Peter Eisenman, I. M. Pei, and Libeskind, and the Briton Norman Foster, charged with representing the state and its response to German history, particularly the Holocaust, were joined by yet more talent imported from abroad to design most of the new embassies. Prize commercial commissions went to Nicholas Grimshaw from England, Jean Nouvel from France, Renzo Piano from Italy, and Frank Gehry and Helmut Jahn from the United States, while Rossi, another Italian, contributed apartments. Of these, however, only Libeskind, Foster, and Nouvel managed creative breakthroughs in their Berlin work. Looking back over the years of hype, discord, and cranes dancing across Potsdamer Platz, one can focus on missed opportunities, of which there were certainly many, but that would discredit the degree to which the process helped stabilize what almost everyone agreed was at stake, German democracy. Although Germans increasingly also discussed their immediate family pasts in this period, it was undoubtedly easier to argue about buildings.16 Could new institutions flourish in spaces with unsavory pasts? To what degree did democracy require strict rules in order to

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survive? To what degree could it nurture bold and even unruly experimentation? And how could people effectively express their dissent from government decisions? Perhaps surprisingly, considering the recent introduction of democracy into the eastern part of the city and all of the city’s immediate hinterland, there were none of the street protests that have marked similar controversies elsewhere. There were, however, plenty of television interviews, newspaper columns, and Internet petitions, not to mention open microphones at public hearings, as groups that typically included supporters from both sides of a recently divided city campaigned to make their views heard. Disagreements focused on at least three very different issues. First, while everyone involved in the debates agreed that National Socialism was bad, there was much less consensus about the quality of its architecture and about which other chapters in the country’s recent past merited censure. Those on the left were generally less nostalgic about the Second Reich, while Easterners of almost all political stripes fought to preserve the physical traces of their recent past. Despite its considerable cultural achievements, the Weimar Republic was not universally loved; it was generally viewed as ineffective. Second, as optimism about finances rose and then quite dramatically fell, there were simple pragmatic questions to be asked about the reuse of solid, well-constructed buildings versus the reconstruction of old ones or the commissioning of new ones. The air ministry, designed for Hermann Goering by Ernst Sagebiel, a former assistant of the Jewish modernist Erich Mendelsohn, had a particularly complex past. In 1949 the German Democratic Republic was declared here; in 1992 it was renamed for Detlev Rohwedder, the assassinated official in charge of the privatization of the East German economy, whose offices had been based in the building. Today, after cost-cutting measures stalled plans to build an almost entirely new set of ministries, it serves as the Finance ministry. Nor were controversies limited to buildings that were still standing. Confusion over whether or not Nazi secret police had used Mendelsohn’s Columbushaus of 1932, demolished following the 1953 uprising, shadowed the reconstruction of Potsdamer Platz.17 And finally there was the issue of style. Very few commentators of the last twenty years followed their nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century predecessors in arguing for the ability of style to generate particular behaviors, much less uncomplicatedly represent political positions. Nonetheless the question of whether neoclassicism could be redeemed colored most discussions about the architecture of a reunited Berlin. Few cities had as rich a neoclassical architectural heritage or one more firmly tied to the establishment of cherished civic institutions. Schinkel’s most esteemed designs included a museum, a theater, and an architecture school. Yet it was in Berlin that the tide finally ran out on the postmodern revival of neoclassical order.

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This did not happen, however, before a large number of buildings were erected in the heart of the city along the lines mandated by Stimmann. Unter den Linden, Friedrichstrasse, and the streets that intersect them are full of such modestly scaled blocks, clad largely in stone. Another generation may yet come to admire their determined decorum, and above all the hostility to commercial spectacle that would have won them admirers among late Wilhelmine reformers. Without a doubt they pay respectful homage to both the architectural heritage of Berlin and the international architectural fashion of their day. And yet they seem at present overwhelmingly dull, providing an inert backdrop for the glitzier exceptions that slipped through the regulatory web. One of the first of these was Jean Nouvel’s Galleries Lafayette store, completed on Friedrichstrasse in 1996. At first glance its glazed façade, especially when seen after its lights go on at dusk, might appear to be just another example of flashy commercial architecture, a view likely to be confirmed by a glimpse of the mirrored atrium at the core of its interior. In fact, it is more literally historicist that almost any building approved by Stimmann. The façade of what remains the only branch of this department-store chain outside Paris pays open homage to Mendelsohn, whose Columbushaus was originally designed as the company’s Berlin flagship.18 No one did more than Mendelsohn to introduce innovative night lighting of shops and department stores to the German interwar cityscape, above all in two phases of the illumination of the Herpich Store, located until its destruction in the Second World War on Leipzigerstrasse, just around the corner from Nouvel’s building.19 Mendelsohn’s designs represented the commercialization of utopian Expressionist schemes by Bruno Taut and his followers, whose aspirations for spiritual renewal were never far removed from a taste for popular spectacle.20 While Mendelsohn himself renounced as inefficient the atria around which most department stores of the period were organized, Nouvel revived this feature. Perhaps in part in homage to Expressionist visions of city crowns he inserted within the store a dazzling upended cone of mirrors that almost certainly served as a crucial precedent for what would become the architectural emblem of a reunited Berlin, Foster’s cupola for the Reichstag, which is wrapped around a similar mirrored cone, the latter reflecting outward rather than inward. The greatest paradox of the reconstruction of Berlin was the degree to which the neo-modernists were repeatedly able to make more effective use of the city’s architectural traditions than were the supporters of historicism. Few of the literal reconstructions so often proposed in the heady days of the early 1990s have as yet to be built, and work on the reconstruction of the Schloss was suspended in the summer of 2010. Historical quotations have been few and largely limited to buildings like the Hotel Adlon, understood as being more commercial than political. More specificity risks too many uncomfortable associations. Yet neo-

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modernists have had few such qualms, not least because they are relatively secure, despite probing revisionist scholarship, about the moral rectitude of the precedents upon which they draw.21 Relatively few of these are openly acknowledged, however, as they would deter from what continues to be marketed as architecture of its own time. And even when the admission is made, the conversation tends to be described in terms of “memory” rather than “history.” The first allows for the emotive recall of an abstracted past that does not imply approval; the second encompasses a specificity, accompanied potentially by detailed ornament, that is not only expensive to craft, but threatens to be more triumphant than haunting. Nonetheless, Berlin is where neo-modernists pushed the boundaries of an established formal language in order to engage the city’s troubled past. No city had hosted more of the key developments in the emergence of the modernism now being reconfigured to commemorate the past rather than represent an industrial present or construct a utopian future. The industrial aesthetic that came to symbolize twentieth-century modernity was invented in Berlin, specifically in Peter Behrens’s designs for everything from factories to fans, posters, typefaces, and shop fronts for the AEG. And although Bruno Taut erected the Glashaus on a fairground in Cologne, the spiritual reaction against Behrens’s commercial pragmatism was also largely based in the capital. During the Weimar Republic no city in the world boasted so many efficient new apartments in tandem with such dazzlingly illuminated cinemas.22 The first evidence that neo-modernism might best achieve the commemorative tasks with which neoclassicism had been so long associated came in Libeskind’s design for the extension of the Berlin city museum, which now houses the Jewish Museum.23 Libeskind won the competition just months before the fall of the Wall. Construction began in 1992 and was completed six years later, although, because of changes in the building’s function (the Berlin city museum had in the interim moved back to its original quarters in the east, and a new institution was founded specifically to inhabit Libeskind’s building), the museum only opened in 2001. In 1989 Libeskind, who had not realized any buildings, was best known for his association with deconstructivism, an architectural style that fused Russian Constructivist forms with French literary theory. Borrowing a technique already employed by Peter Eisenman for an apartment block abutting Checkpoint Charlie, Libeskind mapped out an elongated star of David along points in the history of Judaism in Berlin and the adjoining building, a former courthouse, that he deemed important. A nearby tradeunion headquarters designed by Mendelsohn provided an additional source for his acute angles.24 Libeskind’s eccentric design might never have been realized had not the Bundestag voted to return the capital to Berlin. This greatly increased the political pressure to complete the first major

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building directly to address the Holocaust in the city in which the mass murder had been planned. Clad in zinc, Libeskind’s lightening bolt conveyed the emotive power of abstraction first harnessed in the early twentieth century by theater directors, including Berlin’s own legendary impresario Max Reinhardt. Libeskind organized the galleries around voids intended to communicate the absence of the city’s Jews, while the Garden of Exile pioneered the disorienting combination of tilted pillars and uneven ground plane later adopted by Peter Eisenman and Richard Serra for their Holocaust Memorial only a few blocks away. A free-standing concrete tower, now known as the Holocaust Tower, hints, despite the hopeful slot of light at the top, at the experience of being trapped in the gas chambers. Although designed to provoke discomfort, the building proved immensely popular. Crowds of enthralled locals, tourists, and architecture students clogged its corridors even before the exhibitions were installed. Meanwhile the process of defending his unusual design caused Libeskind to morph from being one of the most opaque architectural theorists of his generation into a public intellectual. The face of the opposition to Stimmann, he was frequently interviewed on television and quoted in the newspapers. His Berlin experiences positioned him perfectly to compete successfully after 9/11 for the commission to design the replacement for the World Trade Center. The architectural emblem of German reunification had a far more complex gestation. The Reichstag sat quasi-abandoned just across the Wall from the Brandenburg Gate on the very edge of West Berlin.25 For many the symbol of the failure of Germany’s first experiments with parliamentary democracy, it had never been considered a distinguished work of architecture. Yet where else could one possibly put the Bundestag upon their return to Berlin from their gleaming new quarters in Bonn, which Günter Behnisch, best known for his work on the Munich Olympics and his relentless opposition to Neoclassical symmetry, had just completed to great acclaim?26 In 1992 Foster entered a limited competition for the Reichstag’s renovation. Work finally began only three years later, but not until Christo and Jean-Claude symbolically cleansed the building by wrapping it in aluminum-covered plastic. This triggered a festive summer in which the city refocused itself around a structure that had previously had very few admirers or advocates. In 1999 Foster’s renovation reopened just ahead of the transfer of the government to Berlin. The transparent dome that is simultaneously one of the city’s bestloved tourist attractions and the most potent symbol of the Berlin Republic was not part of Foster’s original design. Instead it was the legislators who insisted on the restoration of something resembling the glazed cupola that had been removed after being badly damaged during the Second World War.27 Only under duress did Foster respond by developing the brilliant

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solution of placing the public literally above the parliament. Although they cannot literally look down upon their elected representatives while ascending its spiral ramp, the fact that the ceiling of the parliamentary chamber is glazed implies such a relationship. The circus atmosphere surrounding Christo’s wrapping of the Reichstag and the opening of the cupola to the public was anticipated as far back as 1993, when the opening salvo was fired in the campaign to demolish the Palast der Republik, a ponderous building from the seventies clad in bronze mirror glass and marble, and to reerect its predecessor, the Hohenzollern palace or Schloss.28 Defenders of the Palast claimed that supporters of the Schloss wanted to erase all traces of the Communist past. This was somewhat disingenuous as opposition to the Palast was certainly partly aesthetic; the Karl Marx Allee (originally the Stalinallee) was quickly protected as a historic monument by Westerners who admired the heroic resistance it represented to modernist planning norms. The former Council of State building of the German Democratic Republic, into which a bay of the original Schloss was inserted, was also spared. Supporters of the reconstruction of the Schloss came from at least two overlapping constituencies. First, architects and planners sought to restore what had been the kernel around which much of the rest of the city, and particularly the civic buildings of Unter den Linden and Museum Island, had developed.29 Second, although there was no talk whatsoever of bringing back the monarchy, there was considerable nostalgia in some quarters for “the good old days,” which included events such as the wedding of Wilhelm II’s daughter, highlighted in the exhibition that accompanied the temporary mockup in 1993 of the building’s façade. Sponsored by Thyssen-Hünnebeck, this full-scale model consisted of fabric printed with the details of the building’s architecture and hung over steel scaffolding. Mirrors helped reduce the prominence of the Palast and give the impression of the possible appearance of a complete reconstruction. The impression of many Berliners at the time was that this was a West German initiative with relatively little local backing. Defenders of the Palast, too, represented more than one point of view. Some certainly viewed the former East Germany with nostalgia. That the building had hosted many popular functions, rather than been reserved for secretive government bureaucrats, helped endear it to former citizens of the GDR. But others, including many West Berliners, were not so much for a building that resembled a second-rate luxury hotel as much as against any continuity with the royal and imperial Prussian past.30 This camp included many who regretted that Walter Ulbricht, the first East German leader, had pulled down a building that had not been irrevocably damaged in the war, but who felt it was dishonest or, at the least, sent the wrong political message, to rebuild it. There was particular concern about the appropriateness of locating the foreign ministry on this pivotal spot, as

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proposed in a 1994 competition, whose results were discarded as much because they were too expensive as because of the ongoing controversy.31 Demolition of the Palast, which had been closed for much of the time since the fall of the Wall due to high concentrations of asbestos, finally began in 2006 and was completed two years later. Current plans call for the creation of the Humboldt Forum within the reconstructed walls of the Schloss with an interior designed by the Italian architect Francesco Stella.32 A mixture of public and private (including American) financing is to pay for the project, which is to include the nonwestern art collections currently housed in the suburban district of Dahlem. The suspension of funding in 2010 has called into question whether it will ever be realized or whether, in fact, a new generation will end up building something entirely different on the site (already proposals for the reconstruction of the Palast are being mooted).33 The reconstruction of the Schloss would fill the city’s most prominent architectural hole, but it is not clear that the Humboldt Forum will rival the Jewish Museum and the Reichstag or even Galleries Lafayette as one of central Berlin’s most popular places. The success of the result may depend as much on public programming as architecture. With multiple commercial, cultural, and governmental centers all located elsewhere it is very unlikely, in any case, that this building will ever again be perceived as the focal point of the entire city. Although it is always difficult to predict the future, it is equally unlikely that this will be more than the last gasp of an exhausted postmodernism. A new modernism, when it finally comes, that breaks free of the various precedents for contemporary architecture established in Germany during the Weimar Republic is likely to be based upon conditions of its own time or on entirely different historical precedents, probably from another city and country. In the meantime the revival of the paradigms developed in Berlin in the extraordinarily creative years that separated Behrens’s Turbine Factory from Mendelsohn’s Columbushaus has transformed architecture around the world. Architectural forms invented to assuage myriad German fears about modernity — that industry and the consumerism it spawned would erase culture, that market-oriented pragmatism would erode spiritualism, and, above all after November 1918, that a defeated country would be barred from occupying the cutting edge of modernity, not least through buildings that were inexpensive to construct but obviously radically new as well as exciting to look at — were now harnessed to express a complex but respectful relationship with different pasts. These ranged from the original glass and iron cupola of the Reichstag, with its faint echo of the exhibition halls and train sheds of the second half of the nineteenth century, to the stage sets of the early years of the twentieth century, and the political propaganda, department stores, and cinemas of the Weimar Republic. These were resurrected out of admiration for a past now cherished for its

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innovations, as well as for their ability to communicate the horror that emanated from the inability in the interwar years to realize an enduring new utopia, whether of the left or the right. Although very much grounded in the specific conditions of Berlin in the 1990s, the neo-modernism that resulted proved easily exportable. Even more ironically, 25,000 tons of steel from the demolished Palast der Republik was sold to Dubai to be used in the construction of the world’s tallest building.34 At least three different aspects of Berlin’s neo-modernism have had a global impact. One is the revival of urban spectacle as intrinsic rather than contrary to high design. After decades of being scorned by aesthetically ambitious architects and their high-minded audiences because of their association with Nazi propaganda, the complex lighting effects pioneered across Germany during the twenties once again dazzle audiences around the world. A second and often related phenomenon is the very glass whose use Stimmann and his allies sought to curtail. Here new technologies pioneered elsewhere nonetheless depend for their widespread popularity upon specifically German expressionist precedent, and upon the widespread contemporary conviction there that transparency can symbolize social transformations and political openness. Finally, the integration of memory into modern architecture, although anticipated by Maya Lin’s cathartic Vietnam War Memorial in Washington, has been proved durable above all by its repeated use in Berlin, especially but by no means exclusively for commemorations of the Holocaust. Twenty years after the fall of the Wall the look of the new has once again been forged in the crucible of Berlin’s politics and its aspirations for a better future. Although located in Berlin, a key context for this accomplishment was that of the West German architectural culture. The fact that architects in the GDR had by definition worked mostly for the state left them ill prepared to compete aggressively for commissions under capitalism. What were for them radically changed conditions were, however, entirely familiar to their counterparts trained in the FRG, whose benefitted as well from the fact that their entire professional infrastructure, including university faculties and journals, remained intact along with that of their partners in the construction industry. Although more famous figures from abroad garnered the bulk of the press coverage, westerners often framed the terms of the debate. Without a single dominant urban center, western Germany had developed a highly regionalized architectural culture, in which trends in prosperous Munich and Stuttgart could be at complete odds with those in the rustbelt of the Ruhrgebiet. Although the official policy of celebrating modernist heritage in the Ruhrgebiet in the 1990s was in direct opposition to that of the Berlin city government, the results overlapped, especially in the case of Latz and Partners Industriepark in Duisburg, designed in 1991. This reinvention of industrial ruins as minimalist art had significant over-

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laps with the new memorial landscape in Berlin and just as great an international resonance.35 The battles over Berlin have ended. Tourists flock to the memorial to the Wall at Bernauer Strasse, but elsewhere the physical evidence of its traces has largely been erased. The city government struggles to fund Berlin’s substantial cultural infrastructure, certainly one of the most positive legacies of its Cold War importance, rather than erect more architectural showpieces. Initial predictions that Berlin would rival Frankfurt or even Düsseldorf as a national or even international center of commerce and capital have failed to materialize. In consequence the pressure to build high-rise office towers has diminished. Berlin’s unique mixture of the scruffy and the cosmopolitan continues to attract artists from across Europe, but the architects come as tourists rather than to work. Berliners in particular and Germans in general now debate the major political issues of the day without recourse to the filter of architecture. While this may diminish the urgency of their architectural patronage, it is certainly healthy for their democracy.

Notes 1

For a pioneering discussion of memory in the context of post-wall Berlin see Jennifer A. Jordan, Structures of Memory: Understanding Urban Change in Berlin and Beyond (Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 2006) and for a discussion of Berlin as a palimpsest see Andreas Huyssen, Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory (Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 2003). 2 The term “critical reconstruction” is the one used by Hans Stimmann to describe official city policy. See Annegret Burg, Downtown Berlin: Building the Metropolitan Mix (Berlin: Bauwelt, 1995). A simple list of literature on the debates of the last twenty years would be substantially longer than this article. The footnotes that follow are intended to document salient aspects and to offer a useful introduction to the subject, not to be comprehensive. The English edition or the English titles of bilingual publications are given in preference to the German. 3 The crucial text here was Charles Jencks, The Language of Postmodern Architecture (New York: Rizzoli, 1977). 4 Philip Johnson and Mark Wigley, Deconstructivist Architecture (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1988); and Rob Krier, Urban Space (New York: Rizzoli, 1979). 5 For instance, Alberto Perez-Gomez, Architecture and the Crisis of Modern Science (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1983). 6 The Bilboa phenomenon is a salient example. The Guggenheim Museum in that Spanish city designed by the American architect Frank Gehry was such a tourist attraction that it helped revitalize the local economy. Although few subsequent projects have had the same success, cities around the world aspire to match it and,

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in consequence, increasingly turn to star architects from abroad rather than local talent for prominent commissions. 7 I refer here to the spectacular aspects of early modernist architecture, only some of which correlate exactly with Expressionism. While interest in Expressionism as a failed utopian project located within modernism’s own origins has been high since the early 1970s, serious attention has been paid only more recently to modernist spectacle and its literally theatrical origins. See Kathleen James, Erich Mendelsohn and the Architecture of German Modernism (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1997), Kathleen James-Chakraborty, German Architecture for a Mass Audience (London: Routledge, 2000), Dietrich Neumann, Architecture of the Night: The Illuminated Building (Munich: Prestel, 2003); Janet Ward, Weimar Surfaces: Urban Visual Culture in 1920s Germany (Berkeley: U of California P, 2001); and Ulrich Gärtner, Kai-Uwe Hemken, and Kai Uwe Schierz, eds, Kunst Licht Spiele (Bielefeld: Kerber Art, 2009). 8 The seminal text, which includes a critique of these assumptions, remains Barbara Miller Lane, Architecture and Politics in Germany, 1918–1945 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1968). 9 Paul Jaskot, Architecture of Oppression: The SS, Forced Labor and the Nazi Monumental Building Economy (New York: Routledge, 2000). 10 For example, Tilmann Buddensieg, Industriekultur: Peter Behrens and the AEG, 1907–1914, trans. Iain Boyd Whyte (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1984). For Schinkel see Barry Bergdoll, Karl Friedrich Schinkel: An Architecture for Prussia (New York: Rizzoli, 1994). 11 Winfried Nerdinger, ed., Bauhaus-Moderne im Nationalsozialismus: Zwischen Anbiederung und Verfolgung (Munich: Prestel, 1992). 12 Josef Paul Kleihues, ed., Internationale Bauausstellung Berlin 1984/87: Die Neubaugebiete; Dokumente, Projekte (Stuttgart: Hatje, 1993). 13 Brian Ladd, The Ghosts of Berlin: Confronting German History in the Urban Landscape (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1997). 14 Kieren Martin, ed., New Architecture Berlin: 1990–2000 (Berlin: Jovis, 1998), and Ulf Meyer, Berlin: Bundeshauptstadt = Capital City (Berlin: Jovis, 1999) are typical celebratory accounts. 15 For instance, Frank Gehry’s Deutsche Bank on Pariserplatz of 1998–2000. 16 For two accounts of debates over the Holocaust Memorial see Michael S. Cullen, Das Holocaust Denkmal: Dokumentation einer Debatte (Zurich: Pendo, 1999) and James E. Young, At Memory’s Edge: After-Images of the Holocaust in Contemporary Art and Architecture (New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 2002). 17 Although Alan Balfour withdrew the claims published in Berlin: The Politics of Order, 1737–1989 (New York: Rizzoli, 1990), Ronald Jones, director of the Konstfack in Stockholm, presented compelling evidence that it was used for interrogations at a symposium entitled “the Moderns,” held at Gothenburg University in September 2008. 18 James, Erich Mendelsohn and the Architecture of German Modernism, 126–39, 225–30.

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Neumann, Architecture of the Night, 130. Wolfgang Pehnt, Die Architektur des Expressionismus (Ostfildern-Ruit, Germany: Hatje-Cantz, 1998). 21 That their faith in the moralism of modernism is partially misplaced was revealed by one of the most important scholarly publications of the period, Nerdinger, ed., Bauhaus-Moderne im Nationalsozialismus (Munich: Prestel, 1999). See also Werner Durth, Deutsche Architekten: Biographische Verflechtungen, 1900–1970 (Braunschweig: Vieweg, 1986). 22 Tilmann Buddensieg, ed., Berlin, 1900–1933: Architecture and Design (New York: Cooper-Hewitt Museum, 1987) and Karl-Heinz Hüter, Architektur in Berlin, 1900–1933 (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1988) are useful introductions to how prominent German architectural historians viewed this legacy on the eve of the Wall’s fall. 23 Bernard Schneider, Daniel Libeskind: Jewish Museum Berlin; Between the Lines (Munich: Prestel, 1999). 24 Conversation with the author, May 1997. 25 Michael S. Cullen and Uwe Kieling, Der deutsche Reichstag: Geschichte eines Parlaments (Berlin: Argon, 1992). 26 Behnisch, like Gehry, would chafe at the restrictions placed upon his one building for the middle of Berlin, the Kunstakademie, also on Pariserplatz. See Werner Durth and Gunter Behnisch, Berlin Pariser Platz: Neubau der Akademie der Künste (Berlin: Jovis, 2005). 27 For the degree to which Kohl and other German politicians equated literal transparency with democracy see Deborah Ascher Barnstone, The Transparent State: Architecture and Politics in Postwar Germany (London: Routledge, 2005), and Michael Wise, Capital Dilemma: Germany’s Search for a New Architecture of Democracy (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1998). 28 Kristin Feiress and Wilhelm von Boddien, Das Schloss? Eine Ausstellung über die Mitte Berlins (Berlin: Ernst & Sohn, 1993). 29 Arbeitsgruppe Berlin-Wettbewerbe, ed., Capital Berlin: Central District Spreeinsel (Berlin: Bauwelt, 1994). 30 Werner Sewing, Architektur zwischen Retrodesign und Eventkultur (Gütersloh: Bertelsmann, 2003). 31 The competition was documented in Arbeitsgruppe Berlin-Wettbewerbe, ed., Capital Berlin: Central District Spreeinsel; Competition for Urban Design Ideas (Berlin: Birkhäuser, 1994). 32 See Michael Kimmelman, “Rebuilding a Palace May Become a Grand Blunder,” New York Times, 31 Dec. 2008, for a critical account of both the program and design for this building. 33 As described by Wilfried Kuehn, in a lecture entitled “Das Schloss als originale Kopie: Der Kuehn-Malvezzi Entwurf für das Humboldt-Forum Berlin,” which he delivered at Situation Kunst in Bochum on 29 January 2010. 20

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“Berlin’s Demolished Socialist Palace Is Revived in Dubai,” DW-World.de, accessed 9 Dec. 2009, http://www.dw-world.de/dw/article/0,2144,3554502,00. html. 35 Udo Weilacher, Syntax of Landscape: The Landscape Architecture of Peter Latz and Partners (Basel: Birkhäuser, 2008). See also Kathleen James-Chakraborty, “Recycling Landscape: Wasteland into Culture,” in Trash Culture: Objects and Obsolescence in Cultural Perspective, ed. Gillian Pye (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2010), 77–94.

7: The Rebirth of Historic Dresden Jürgen Paul

A

LTHOUGH THE RECONSTRUCTION of Berlin garnered the bulk of the international attention paid to contemporary German architecture and urbanism, it was not the only city in the newly reunited country whose appearance changed radically during these years. How to reinvent the past to serve as the badge of a proud past and possibly progressive — but firmly capitalist — future was a common theme from the Ruhrgebiet in the western corner of the country to Saxony in the far east.1 While in Berlin and the Ruhrgebiet most of the history employed in this effort was relatively recent, dating back no further than the second quarter of the nineteenth century, in Dresden the magical moment was roughly a century earlier and so more completely divorced from debates over current styles. And while Berliners dallied about reconstructing the Schloss that had once stood at the center of their city, Dresdeners were far less timid. Their reconstruction of the Frauenkirche and its surroundings defied modernism and Communism’s shared commitment to destroying the past and attempted as well to simultaneously recall a cherished past and create a prosperous future. The transformation of the heart of Dresden is of enormous importance for the way in which Germans viewed their country’s history in the two decades following the fall of the Berlin Wall. First, in the reconstruction of the Frauenkirche it supplied the most important old-new German architectural symbol of the period located outside Berlin. Here, as in Munich in the 1950s, the erection of replicas and near-replicas of buildings destroyed during the Second World War was more important than the development of new architectural styles. Although questions have been raised about the authenticity of the results, they appear to have satisfied most Dresdners, not to mention tourists. Second, the latter are key, as although necessarily focused on the unique past of a particular city, the way in which Dresden has been rebuilt since 1989 was shaped not only by its own poignant history but also by international trends in urban imagemaking, largely in the service of this lucrative industry. Dresden was, with about 500,000 residents, the third largest city in the GDR, after East Berlin and Leipzig. Before the Second World War, with 650 000 residents, it had been the sixth largest city in the German

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Reich. Before 1806 it was the seat of the Electorate of Saxony. Until 1918 it was the capital of a kingdom, during the Weimar Republic it was the capital of the Free State of Saxony, a status that it lost in 1933 in the wake of the National Socialist policy of Gleichschaltung (“coordination,” for example the homogenization of institutions and life in line with Nazi policy). After the foundation of the GDR in 1949, the Free State of Saxony, with Dresden as capital, existed for a short period until 1952, when Saxony was split up into three districts with Dresden as district capital. Since 1990, in the Federal Republic of Germany, it has regained its status as capital of the Free State of Saxony. Its inhabitants are convinced that Dresden is a city unlike any other. It is a mythical place, or at least, something special. Dresden boasts of being a city of the fine arts and music, a city of a great cultural tradition, dating back to the eighteenth century, when it was the most splendid capital of the late Baroque in Germany. It became the center of the Romantic movement around 1800, and after that, the center of reform movements around 1900. Augustus the Strong, Prince Elector of Saxony and King of Poland; Caspar David Friedrich, the Romantic painter; Richard Wagner, the composer; and Gottfried Semper, the architect, are some of the best-known figures associated with the city’s rich cultural history.2 The garden city of Hellerau is almost a holy district, and its avant-garde cultural festivals are legendary events. Dresden considers itself (and it may have been) the noblest and most beautiful of the larger cities in Germany. Its beauty, its charming natural setting and environment, and its elevated cultural life attracted wealthy foreigners, many of whom settled there during the nineteenth century. There was an English church, an American church, a Scottish church, and a Russian church; only the latter still exists. Large parts of the city consisted of villas and freestanding apartment houses surrounded by gardens. Before its destruction, Dresden was a beautiful city, but it was no longer merely Baroque. The nineteenth century had left its stamp in Dresden too, as it had in Paris, Vienna, or Barcelona.3 Up to almost the end of the Second World War Dresden, unlike all the other large cities in Germany, remained undamaged. Several myths assured its residents that the city would not be destroyed: because Winston Churchill’s aunt lived there, because there was a secret agreement between Hitler and Churchill saying that if the Germans did not destroy Oxford and Cambridge, Dresden would be spared from bombs; and even that the Allies had designated Dresden to become the national capital of post-war Germany.4 On the night of 13–14 February 1945, RAF Bomber Command carried out two bombing raids on Dresden, dropping more than two thousand tons of high explosives on the city.5 Fifteen square kilometers of the city were totally destroyed, not just the historic center. Many of the historic buildings, however, were only burned out. Their outer walls still

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stood, so many of them could have been rebuilt.6 But after the end of the war the new Communist regime ordered almost all the ruins to be leveled, with the exception of a handful of outstanding buildings, for example the Zwinger, the Kreuzkirche, the Hofkirche, and the Palais im Großen Garten. Instead of rebuilding the former city in its feudal glory, they wanted to rebuild a Socialist Dresden. In Dresden this is considered to be the second destruction of the city. Rebuilding started in 1953 at the Altmarkt, the historic market place that the Communists enlarged to three times its original size. It was converted into a site for political mass demonstrations along the lines of similar demonstration squares in the Soviet Union. Soviet-inspired guidelines specified that national and local traditions should be quoted in order to demonstrate that the working class, as the leading power of the new Socialist society, were replacing the feudal and bourgeois classes and their cultural traditions.7 Thus the new buildings, adopting the nineteenthcentury form of blocks of flats, were decorated in Baroque style. This Stalinist architecture, however, was soon abandoned because it was much too costly. Under Khruschev, architecture had to be economical and industrialized. The result in Dresden was pre-fabricated panel construction, using a system that became uniform all over East Germany starting in the 1970s.8 This is considered to be the third destruction of Dresden. Dresden had lost its historic townscape, but in the minds of Dresdners it had not lost its cultural identity. During the decades of Communist rule, people felt that Dresden was the alternative to East Berlin. Berlin was the home of the regime, the party, and the government. By contrast, Dresden was the home of arts and culture. The official central art exhibition was held here every five years, and just about every second man or — even more — woman in Dresden painted or produced sculpture. And there was music and opera, even while the famous opera house was still in ruins. The Staatskapelle, the oldest symphony orchestra in Europe, as well as a second symphony orchestra, the Dresdner Philharmoniker, guaranteed busy concert seasons. While many designs for the rebuilding of the city proposed to destroy the ruins of even the important historic landmarks, some of the major historical buildings were restored during the GDR years; these included the Baroque Zwinger, the equally Baroque Catholic Hofkirche, and in 1956, when the Soviet Union returned the collection upon the occasion of the city’s 750th anniversary, Gottfried Semper’s art gallery. Semper’s famous Opera House remained a ruin for many decades, as did the Royal Castle. The castle’s ruins were in danger of being destroyed many times. The regime never justified its plans with ideological or political arguments but proffered practical reasons: the ruins were not stable, or the castle could not be rebuilt for modern practical uses. But the preservation office and the Technical University always cooperated in proving that, on the

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contrary, the walls were still stable and that the castle could be rebuilt as a hotel, library, student dormitory, or the like. After criticism had arisen in Dresden that all the money for cultural buildings was being spent on the capital, Berlin, Erich Honecker, the party chief, allowed the rebuilding of the opera house in Dresden in 1976. After long discussions, the local administration finally decided to restore the interior faithfully to Gottfried Semper’s original design. In 1985, on the fortieth anniversary of its destruction, the opera house opened with Karl Maria von Weber’s Freischütz, in the presence of international guests, including West Germany’s chancellor Helmut Schmidt. However, opposite the opera house the ruins of the Royal Castle had been left untouched. In order to pretend that something was being done, scaffolds were put up around the ruins. Meanwhile it had been decided that the castle should be rebuilt as an extension of the art museums. But, as no work commenced, the scaffolds remained standing, peacefully rusting for five more years. After the unexpected fall of the Wall a small group of Dresden citizens — art historians, scientists, doctors, dentists, and a Lutheran pastor — came together on 13 February 1990 to put forward a public demand for the rebuilding of the Baroque Frauenkirche (Church of Our Lady).9 The Frauenkirche, built 1727–43 according to the designs of the city architect George Bähr, had been one of the outstanding landmarks of Dresden. It was considered to be the most important church building of Lutheran Protestantism.10 But more than that, with its monumental stone dome, the Frauenkirche had been one of the chief elements of the famous architectural river front of Dresden. Burned out in the bombing raid, the church remained upright for one more day and then caved in. The collapse of the domed church remained the symbol of Dresden’s destruction for forty years.11 In 1948–49 the Landesamt für Denkmalpflege (the office for preservation) suggested that it would be possible to reconstruct the church. Hans Nadler, one of the leading conservationists and professor at the TU Dresden, explained in a letter in 1952 that the technical conditions would allow a reconstruction. However, in the same breath he conceded that the church was unlikely to be rebuilt in the coming years.12 After that, there were many threats to level the ruin and the pile of stones. Cleverly, the curator of monuments succeeded in avoiding this by persuading the Communist party to declare the ruin a memorial against war. Given this significance, the ruin survived, surrounded by roses planted to prevent people from climbing on it. After 1990 the rebuilding of the Frauenkirche now seemed possible. Public opinion was divided. Those who were against the idea argued that the ruin had become a more important symbol of history as a memorial than the historic Baroque church. Furthermore, the opponents of rebuilding said that money was needed instead for more important things, such

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as housing and social programs. The Lutheran church administration, still the owner of the ruin, declared that there was no need for the church, the parish community no longer existed, and anyway, the Baroque splendor of the Frauenkirche would not accord with today’s religious spirit. The fact was that neither the church nor the government was willing to pay for the rebuilding, so the project could only be financed by donations. Fierce criticism then came from those, mostly West Germans, who said that the rebuilding of a destroyed artistic architectural monument contradicted all ethical principles of historic monuments preservation. It would mean reversing history, and it would produce nothing but falsification of an authentic work of art.13 For these people, too, the ruin and its meaning as a memorial against war and its destructive spirit had become the more authentic document of history. Those who wanted the church rebuilt had to offer counterarguments. If the ruins had been seen as a memorial against war, the rebuilt church would have to be presented as a monument for peace and reconciliation. The greatest problem, however, was how to fund the project. The costs were estimated at 150 million euros. It was very important to publicize the project beyond local boundaries, to promote it into a national task. These efforts succeeded. The image of Dresden as the national symbol for wartime destruction was now translated into the project of rebuilding the war-destroyed Frauenkirche. Immediately after unification there was a real desire for an enterprise symbolizing national solidarity between the former West and East. The donations arrived chiefly from former West Germany, some even from the United States, Great Britain, and other countries. In 1994, the State Government of Saxony, the city of Dresden, and the Lutheran Church of Saxony established a foundation as owner and building patron.14 Rebuilding started the same year. From the beginning there was agreement that the church should be reconstructed as it was in 1753, in terms of both its exterior and its interior. The ruins should be restored and included, and as much as possible original stone material should be reused. In this way the rebuilt Baroque building would not be a copy made from nothing but could be seen as an organic restoration of the original. In October 2005, the new-old Frauenkirche was completed and consecrated. The beginning of construction in 1994 silenced earlier criticisms. The Lutheran church changed its position; the city of Dresden decided to contribute 10 percent of the costs. Even when it was still under construction, the Frauenkirche became a first-rate tourist attraction. But first of all, the people in Dresden became more and more enthusiastic and proud. During the rebuilding years, large public events were held regularly beside the building site: Christmas services, inauguration celebrations for completed parts, the arrival of the church bells, and so on. The crowds attending these events became larger and larger.

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With the rebuilding of the Frauenkirche the mood within Dresden changed thoroughly. During the postwar decades the people in Dresden had identified themselves with the destruction of their city. They were convinced that no other German city had suffered as much. Commemoration ceremonies on the anniversary of the bombing had become a tradition.15 Thousands used to stand in silence, placing burning candles at the ruins of the Frauenkirche. Increasingly, these demonstrations of commemoration took on the character of a silent protest against the Communist regime. These candle-lit ceremonies continued even after the rebuilding of the Frauenkirche had begun. Remembrance of the fall of Dresden reached a climax on its fortieth anniversary in 1995 with large commemorating celebrations in the presence of prominent international guests, among them the American violinist Yehudi Menuhin. By that time this self-pity began to recede behind renewed memories of the great history of the city, the rebirth of which was now evident in the rebuilt great landmark, the Frauenkirche. With the completion of the dome of the Frauenkirche, the famous riverfront architecture of Dresden was complete again, after the Baroque castle tower had already been given a copy of its high steeple in 1991.16 As soon as the project of rebuilding the Frauenkirche became concrete, a debate arose about the question of its future architectural surroundings. Until 1945 the Baroque character of this part of the old city of Dresden, although mostly in rather decrepit condition because of social decline. Now the demand arose to have the old city rebuilt in its historic form. Another fierce debate began.17 It had been commonly agreed that the historical ground-plan of streets should be restored and the buildings should be limited in size, respecting the proportional relationship to the Frauenkirche. But for many, this was not enough. They demanded the rebuilding of the houses with their original Baroque facades. Architects protested, declaring that if new houses had Baroque facades, it would be a declaration of cultural bankruptcy. But the vision of a revived historic townscape instantly became very popular. An association, Gesellschaft Historischer Neumarkt Dresden (Society for the Rebuilding of the Historical Neumarkt Dresden), was founded in 1998 to promote the historic-building scheme and to provide the necessary documentation.18 In 2000, the association of architects together with the Saxon Academy of Fine Arts organized a competition to demonstrate modern building designs. It received a negative reception in Dresden. The explanation was: “Architects may build modern buildings wherever they please, but not here around the Frauenkirche. In this small part of the city, we insist on bringing back historic architecture. Besides, most of these modern architects are West Germans, and we will not tolerate West Germans dictating what our city should look like.” Finally the city council decided on a concept that provided for the faithful reconstruction of a considerable number

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of the destroyed Baroque houses, while placing modern houses in between. The new buildings were to be integrated in proportion and unobtrusive in design. The city appointed a commission to observe the employment of these principles. At first it was doubtful whether any one could be expected to invest. The ideal, of course, would have been the individual building owner, say, the baker who has his shop on the ground floor and lives with his family upstairs. But, of course, the project had to meet the economic requirements and interests of a modern city. Only large-scale and commercially orientated investors could be expected. The planning department wanted as much residential use as possible, at least 20 percent, in order to promote normal city life. But high land prices would result in high rents, and the clientele capable of paying it would not want to live there. Furthermore, there was a surplus of both housing and office space in Dresden. It was the textile merchant Arturo Prisco from Italy who initiated the solution. He decided to build up an entire street block right next to the Frauenkirche. German banks refused to give him credit, which he received from Dutch banks instead. The project provided that only one of the historic houses would be completely reconstructed — not only the façade but also the interior room division. Other houses were given only Baroque façades, and previously modest houses were replaced in modern, but assimilating forms. The interior space of the block became filled with a three-story glass-roofed shopping gallery. The entire compound contains plenty of restaurants, a hotel, many luxury shops, office space, and some small apartments. The historic stone cellars that had been excavated were completely dug out to make deeper basements and underground garages. But without these modern facilities no investor would have been willing to build here. This resulted in the paradoxical phenomenon that authentic history below ground was destroyed to allow imitated history to be built above ground. The new-old building block immediately became a great success, both sociallyand economically. It profited from the crowds of tourists that came to Dresden to see the rebuilding of the Frauenkirche. Soon more investors arrived to build even larger blocks. All the building blocks have the same structure. New concrete foundations and one- or two-story basements, car garages below ground, the buildings constructed of concrete, their façades reflecting the historic lot structure, but behind them mostly two or three lots joined together. The façades repeat the historic Baroque structure and decoration, on some of them even the eighteenth-century appearance that had already been lost during the nineteenth century. For a large hotel an eighteenth-century building was restored that had been replaced by a new post office in the late nineteenth century. Between the historic façades more or less decently designed modern interiors fill the concrete structures. More restaurants and cafés with pseudo-antique interior decoration,

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more luxury and souvenir shops, more office space, and more hotels were crowded around the Frauenkirche. Four large blocks have been completed, but five more blocks must still be built to complete the former historic neighborhood between the former Royal Castle and the Kurländer Palais behind the Frauenkirche. The present economic crisis, however, has now stopped all further projects. Thus the new historic city center of Dresden may remain a fragment — at least for some time. In any case, the square directly around the Frauenkirche has been almost completed. The Frauenkirche has got back its urban structure and its architectural frame. This architectural frame has the character of a picture, a three-dimensional animation of the former historic neighborhood. Critics denounce it as a historic stage setting, comparable to Disneyland and Las Vegas.19 But I do not think a comparison to Disneyland is valid. Unlike Disneyland, the buildings around the Frauenkirche are on authentic sites and give a true picture of the past. In any case, the people of Dresden are very happy, and the tourists are enthusiastic. Of course, this new historic Dresden is not a normal city environment. It is something like a reservation, where one can retreat from present-day working life into a romantic paradise. The same may be said of many authentic historic sites around the world. Despite the many shops around the Frauenkirche, the people who live there have to go elsewhere to buy a loaf of bread or a carton of milk. Maybe in a few years, under different conditions, the new historic Neumarkt around the Frauenkirche will become a normal urban neighborhood. Rather than criticizing or even condemning this artificial paradise, I think it is more revealing to inquire into the reasons and intentions behind it. It has certainly a lot to do with the increasingly strict distinction and separation between working life and leisure, everyday work on one side and private life, weekend life, vacation, and tourism on the other. The large city is a system of labor division. It reflects the usual dichotomy of our surroundings. Work life is expected to be rational, modern, technical, abstract; the world of leisure, however, should be emotional, sensual, natural, narrative, and historical. A business hotel at the airport, for instance, must be modern in style; a vacation hotel in contrast must be picturesque and historicizing. The people of Dresden at last are able to boast about the history of their city in concrete plasticity. By history, they mean the Baroque period, considered to be the greatest historical phase of the city. The Splendor of Dresden was the title of an exhibition consisting of treasures from the Dresden art collections that was shown in the United States and Japan beginning in 1978.20 It was Communist political propaganda by cultural means. Now the splendors of Dresden can be seen again in splendid buildings. The Communist regime claimed it was building a new Dresden as a city of Socialism. After unification, the people of Dresden understood their

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new democratic freedom to include the right to return to the “feudalistic” history of the city — Dresden as the once-most-splendid capital of Baroque court life and culture in Germany. The symbol for this return is the rebuilding of the former Royal Castle. As a matter of fact, the Dresden castle had not been one of the great monuments of palace architecture before its destruction but was a rather awkward pastiche of architectural history. Once (in the second half of the sixteenth century) the largest and most splendid of Renaissance castles in Germany, it was party destroyed by fire in 1701. The subsequent restoration concentrated on the suite of magnificent state rooms. The exterior appearance of the castle remained unostentatious. During the eighteenth century many designs were made for a new and large Royal Castle in Dresden. But Augustus the Strong and his son, who were both Electors of Saxony and Kings of Poland, divided their building activities between Dresden and Warsaw. Great projects were planned here and there, but very little was realized. The new palace in Dresden was never built. In 1889, on the 800th anniversary of the Wettin dynasty taking over power in Saxony, an embellishing restoration of the exterior of the Royal Castle transformed it back into a Renaissance palace, a task completed in 1906. At the end of Communist rule over East Germany, plans were made to rebuild the ruined castle for museum use, and as a result the Renaissance revivalist exterior was faithfully restored. The walls of the large courtyard, however, were to get back their sixteenth-century sgraffiti decoration that had disappeared three centuries before. The treasure rooms of the famous Green Vault that had partially survived were to be completely restored to their eighteenth-century splendor. The Baroque state rooms and the nineteenth-century ball room were also to be restored. Other parts of the interior were to have modern forms. Now almost completed, the rebuilt Royal Castle has become a patchwork of authentic and reinvented history with modern parts. It presents an artificial appearance of history with modern interiors equipped with the most sophisticated technology. The most important quality for the revitalized conception of history in Dresden is that it is royal, or, at least, that it should look royal. The restored rooms of the Green Vault have become another major tourist attraction. The restoration of the Baroque state rooms is in preparation. Now and then, tourists naively ask for the way to the Green Grotto, or, for the Mona Lisa in the picture gallery, confusing Florence on the Elbe with Capri, Rafael with Leonardo, and the Gemäldegalerie with the Louvre. Everybody knows that there is a worldfamous painting in the Dresden Gemäldegalerie that you ought to see. In 1993 in the shell of the state rooms, still under construction, a large exhibition on the Saxon-Polish personal union embodied by Augustus the Strong and his son took place, organized jointly by the Dresden State Art Collections and the Royal Castle Museum in Warsaw.21 Ever since,

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numerous other exhibitions have celebrated the Saxon monarchy and the cultural life of the royal court in Dresden, among them a very extensive exhibition organized in conjunction with the National Museum in Beijing, which compared the Dresden court in the eighteenth century with that of the Chinese Emperors.22 It showed that there was, in fact, little to compare. In 2009 there was an exhibit on the dynastic relations between the Saxon and the Danish monarchies.23 Numerous splendid objects are displayed in all these exhibitions: gold and silver vessels, objects of ebony and crystal, jewelry, elaborate pieces of furniture, historic costumes, and many portraits — all of it admired by the crowds of tourists who visit the Frauenkirche. Dresden has again become the capital of a monarchy, so to speak — without the monarch, however. In 2006 the many festivities celebrating the 800th anniversary of the city of Dresden culminated in a historic parade, with King Augustus the Strong riding on a white horse. Unfortunately the performer was not a good actor. How is all this to be judged? I am far from seeing it critically, although I may be slightly amused. Dresden has profited greatly from the monumental revival of its history, both psychologically and economically. And many of the aspects and side-effects connected with the rebirth of historic Dresden are worldwide cultural phenomena anyway. Dresden has regained its fame of being one of the most beautiful cities in Germany. But not too far away from the Royal Castle, the Zwinger, the Picture Gallery, and the Opera House as well as from the Frauenkirche and its new historic surroundings, Dresden is a perfectly normal city with its new commercial center consisting of more or less attractive or undistinguished buildings: shops, offices, and housing, many of them stemming from the Communist period. Some are renovated; many have been built during the past twenty years. And Dresden still has a nineteenth-century neighborhood that survived the bombing. It is full of bars, cafés, discotheques, and little theaters. Young people live here, who are not particularly interested in Augustus the Strong, his mistresses, his gilded throne, or his treasures. The reverse side of the new enthusiasm for history in Dresden is that Dresdners have hardly any interest in the new contemporary architecture in their city. Since the 1990s, prominent architects have erected a number of new buildings of outstanding quality. But Dresden does not want to be a modern city. It wants to be historic and royal, not just bourgeois and democratic, and certainly not Communist. The middle-aged and older generations seem to want to go back beyond the First World War. But there is also a young generation. For them Dresden is not a myth but just a normal contemporary city.

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Notes 1

See Wolfgang Pehnt, Deutsche Architektur seit 1900 (Ludwigsburg: Wüstenrot Stiftung; Munich: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 2005), 431–514 for the most comprehensive survey of the first three-quarters of this period. 2 For a detailed analysis of Dresden’s court culture and its rise under the Albertines see Helen Watanabe-O’Kelly, Court Culture in Dresden: From Renaissance to Baroque (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002). 3 For Hellerau see Ralph Lindner and Hans-Peter Lühr, eds., Gartenstadt Hellerau: Die Geschichte ihrer Bauten (Dresden: Sandstein, 2008). 4 On this issue see Max Seydewitz’s summary of reasons Dresdners offered as to why their city would not be bombed: Max Seydewitz, Die unbesiegbare Stadt: Zerstörung und Wiederaufbau von Dresden (Dresden: Sächsische Zeitung, 1955), 59. 5 The authoritative historical account is Götz Bergander’s book Dresden im Luftkrieg: Vorgeschichte — Zerstörung — Folgen, 2nd enlarged ed. (Weimar: Böhlau, 1994), see also Paul Addison and Jeremy A. Crang, eds., Firestorm — The Bombing of Dresden, 1945 (London: Pimlico, 2006). 6 On the destruction of the architectural heritage after the war see Matthias Lerm, Abschied vom alten Dresden: Verluste der historischen Bausubstanz (Rostock: Hinstorff, 2000). 7 On the early building program in the GDR see Werner Durth, Jörn Düwel and Niels Gutschow, Architektur und Städtebau der DDR: Die frühen Jahre (Berlin: Jovis, 2007). 8 See Klaus von Beyme, Der Wiederaufbau: Architektur und Städtebaupolitik in beiden deutschen Staaten (Munich: Piper, 1987), 291–301. 9 Ludwig Güttler, ed., Der Wiederaufbau der Dresdner Frauenkirche: Botschaft und Ausstrahlung einer weltweiten Bürgerinitiative (Regensburg: Schnell & Steiner, 2006). 10 See Jürgen Paul, “Der protestantische Kirchenbau des Barock und die Dresdner Frauenkirche,” Die Dresdner Frauenkirche, Jahrbuch 6 (2000): 131–60. 11 On the symbolic function of the Frauenkirche and its manifold artistic representations see Katrin Gemser, “Die Kuppel der Frauenkirche in der Kunst,” in Der Blick auf Dresden: Die Frauenkirche und das Werden der Dresdener Stadtsilhouette, ed. Anna Greve, Gilbert Lupfer, and Peter Plaßmeyer (Munich: Deutscher Kunstverlag, 2005), 81–94. 12 For more details see Nadler’s account, “Der Erhalt der Frauenkirche nach 1945,” in Güttler, Der Wiederaufbau der Frauenkirche, 77–89. 13 For a response see my “Wiederaufbau der Frauenkirche — Kritik und Rechtfertigung,” in “Die Dresdener Frauenkirche,” Dresdner Hefte 32 (1992): 35–45. 14 Güttler, Der Wiederaufbau der Frauenkirche. 15 On the repertoire of the commemoration ceremonies see Matthias Neutzner, “Vom Anklagen zum Erinnern: Die Erzählung vom 13. Februar,” in Das rote

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Leuchten: Dresden und der Bombenkrieg, ed. Oliver Reinhard, Matthias Neutzner, and Wolfgang Hesse (Dresden: Edition Sächsiche Zeitung, 2005), 128–63. 16 On this issue see Jürgen Paul, “Die Stadt am Wasser,” in Der Blick auf Dresden: Die Frauenkirche und das Werden der Dresdener Stadtsilhouette, ed. Anna Greve, Gilbert Lupfer, and Peter Plaßmeyer (Munich: Deutscher Kunstverlag, 2005), 20–27. 17 See my “Dresden — Eine Stadt als Denkmal,” Der Architekt 4 (1996): 302–5. 18 See the website for the society, accessed 15 Jul. 2010, http://www.neumarktdresden.de/. 19 Andreas Ruby, “Las Vegas an der Elbe,” Zeit Online, accessed 15 Jul. 2000, http://www.zeit.de/2000/46/200046_dresden.xml?page=1. 20 It opened at the National Gallery in Washington, DC, where it was the inaugural exhibit in the new East Building, and was also seen at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the California Palace of the Legion of Honor in San Francisco. Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and California Palace of the Legion of Honor in San Francisco, The Splendor of Dresden: Five Centuries of Art Collecting, exhibition catalogue (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1978). 21 See Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden, Königliches Schloss zu Warschau. “Unter einer Krone: Kunst und Kultur der sächsisch-polnischen Union,” exhibition catalogue (Leipzig: Edition Leipzig, 1997). 22 The exhibition was on view in Dresden from 11 October 2008 to 11 January 2009. For the catalogue see Cordula Bischoff and Anne Hennings, eds., Goldener Drache / Weißer Adler: Kunst im Dienste der Macht am Kaiserhof von China und am sächsisch-polnischen Hof (1644–1795), exhibition catalog (Munich: Hirmer, 2008). 23 For the catalogue of the exhibition, which ran from 23 August 2009 to 4 January 2010 at the Staatliche Kunstsammlung in Dresden, see Claudia Brink and Jutta Kappel, eds., Mit Fortuna übers Meer: Sachsen und Dänemark und Allianzen im Spiegel der Kunst, 1848–1709, exhibition catalog (Munich: Deutscher Kunstverlag, 2009).

Part III. Retrospective Reimaginings: The Death and Afterlife of the GDR in Contemporary Literature

8: Labyrinths, Mazes, and Mosaics: Fiction by Christa Wolf, Ingo Schulze, Antje Rávic Strubel, and Jens Sparschuh Elizabeth Boa

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in this volume Peter Fritzsche notes how different start dates produce different historical narratives: temporal perspective shapes the contours and fixes the boundaries of a field of inquiry. Perspective, contours, boundaries, and field are, of course, spatial metaphors. If the events of 1989 marked an epochal revolution, they also precipitated a geographical revolution: along with the institutions of actually existing socialism the whole geography of power collapsed.1 The sheer suddenness encouraged arguments in favor of the hardness of culture: spaces mapped by cultural geography perhaps trump times chronicled by political history. To quote an early geographer, however: “Geographie without Historie has life and motion but at randome, and unstable; Historie without Geographie like a dead carcasse has neither life nor motion at all.”2 This essay will explore the mediation through literary form of time and place in novels reflecting a historico-geographic revolution in a selection of novels by East German authors, one earlier work, Christa Wolf’s Kindheitsmuster (A model childhood, 1977), the others written since unification: Wolf’s Leibhaftig (In the flesh, 2002), Ingo Schulze’s Simple Storys (1998) and Adam und Evelyn (2008), Ante Rávic Strubel’s Unter Schnee (Under snow, 2001), Jens Sparschuh’s Eins zu Eins (One to one, 2003), and finally Wolf’s most recent work, Stadt der Engel oder The Overcoat of Dr. Freud (Town of angels or the overcoat of Dr. Freud, 2010).3 At issue will be how shadows from the past shape the contours of the present and conversely how shadows from the future fall back across preunification landscapes in novels written since unification. What indeed are the landscapes now that a geographical revolution has freed up movement in Europe and cheap travel and the electronic media are opening up ever more places and spaces of real and virtual encounter? Where are the “Erinnerungsräume,” the spaces of memory, in this ever-expanding — or should it be contracting? — world? All the novels portray real locations N THE OPENING ESSAY

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that become “Gedächtnisorte,” memorial places that trigger remembering.4 Much has been written of the spatial turn: in literature, intertextual allusion creates spaces of cultural encounter.5 Along with when and where, who sees or tells is crucial. Wolf’s narrators often address themselves qua protagonist in the second or even third person. In Adam und Evelyn, third-person narration is focalized through Adam, though Eve occasionally emerges from Adam’s rib. Schulze is best known, however, for Simple Storys and the hybrid short-story novel with a variety of perspectives. This is the form, too, of Strubel’s Unter Schnee. Although Sparschuh’s Eins zu Eins has the same narrator throughout, the hero’s desultory encounters in provincial Brandenburg as he quixotically pursues a doomed quest create a mosaic-like effect. Categorization of novels generally seeks to bind form to meaning. I propose to allocate Wolf’s Kindheitsmuster and Leibhaftig to a labyrinthine mode in which memory and the past threaten to extinguish action and the present. I shall then compare these memory-labyrinths with mazily meandering journeys in the other novels, where the vertical line down into the past recedes as compared with horizontal connections in the present or else proliferates, so offering multiple choices of direction. The maze is, of course, a kind of labyrinth. But getting terrifyingly lost in the Cretan labyrinth, a building hiding a monster, is different from being disconcertingly lost out of doors in a garden maze, though monsters may lurk there too. In Wolf’s Stadt der Engel, there is neither inside nor outside, neither entry nor exit, just a mosaic of fragments with no center.

Wolf’s Memory-Labyrinths: Kindheitsmuster and Leibhaftig Kindheitsmuster tells of the narrator’s holiday pilgrimage to the town of her birth: the crossing of a geographical border is also an attempt to travel back across the tear through time separating the Third Reich, when Landsberg an der Warthe was still in Brandenburg, from divided Germany and the Oder-Neiße line, beyond which now lies the Polish town of Gorzów Wielkopolski. Three periods overlap. The protagonist of the earliest strand from around 1932 to 1947 is Nelly Jordan, the narrator’s childhood self, who was born in 1929, as was Christa Wolf. The second strand covers the journey on 10 and 11 July 1971. The third period, from November 1972 to May 1975, is the time of writing and mixes current events in the GDR and internationally with essayistic reflections on memory and writing. Endless snippets about now interrupt the fascinating and horrific unfolding of what life and death were like then, frustrating readers curious to hear the child’s tale.6 The labyrinthine mode helps to make sense of this intricacy. As the narrator notes, the word “Muster” is cognate

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with Latin “monstrum” meaning a sample that demonstrates (47). But of course it also means monster. The monster at the center of the Cretan labyrinth had a human body but a bull’s head. Every nine years King Minos sacrificed young Athenians to the Minotaur until a hero came to save the young people. But in Kindheitsmuster the young person is both sacrificial victim and monster, an innocent child yet enthralled to evil. An exemplary good child, Nelly is full of imaginative curiosity and instinctive moral insight. Yet under the influence of teachers and peers these very qualities feed into her idealistic fervor for the cause and worship of the leader.7 Nelly is thus double-natured. Following her thread of memory, the narrator is an Ariadne in search of the hybrid monster within herself. That is the labyrinth in the text. But there is also the labyrinth of the text. Penelope Reed Doob emphasizes the duality of textual labyrinths that embody “both superb design and unfathomable chaos.”8 They switch perspectivally between confused wandering within and clear vision from above of Daedalian artistic structure. But in the twentieth century, Daedalus is himself often entrapped.9 In Kindheitsmuster jolting shifts of perspective switch between an entangling past and a matted web, a “verfilztes Geflecht” (317) of present labyrinthine reflection.10 Yet such aesthetic failings, as measured by Classical norms, make Kindheitsmuster exemplary in its grappling with events that defy the explanatory powers of historians and the imagination of writers alike. Kindheitsmuster remains one of the most striking reflections on the Third Reich in German literature, but the revelation in 1993 of Wolf’s Stasi involvement changed the conditions of reading. As Wolf herself keeps asking in Stadt der Engel, how could she forget the details of her Stasi collaboration, given that remembering is her business as an author? Kindheitsmuster seeks to overcome forgetting, yet the outcome is unclear. Has Ariadne saved the child-victim from the Minotaur or is Nelly just a screen for guilty self-justification? Or is she the undead: is the child so eager to please her Nazi teacher, so worshipful of the Führer, still at work in the writer as lackey of the GDR state? Press polemics in the 1990s transformed Wolf from internationally esteemed socialist-feminist critic of an authoritarian regime into state lackey, as literature was instrumentalized in a battle to establish that good Western values had triumphed over the evils of Communism.11 Such a view threatened to consign citizens of the GDR to the either-or positions of bad collaborator or good victim-dissident, reducing identity to political role and draining life otherwise of meaning. Much debate since has turned on how to get away from this Manichean drama to less polarized judgments. Kindheitsmuster made such a shift in its subversion of the GDR founding myth, it too a Manichean vision: in orthodox Marxist analysis the Third Reich was a fascist outgrowth of capitalism; thus capitalist West Germany lost the war and inherited the guilt; socialist East Germany, by contrast, liberated by the Soviet Union in

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alliance with the anti-fascist resistance, was the victor in step with history. But without at all equating the Third Reich and the GDR, Kindheitsmuster insists on sociopsychological continuities: the past is not dead; it is not even past.12 The narrator’s daughter Lenka is a lively teenager in the now hopeful world of the GDR. But the novel also alludes to Stalinist persecution and criticizes the GDR for authoritarianism, inadequate education about the Holocaust, and popular racism. Such acknowledgment of cultural continuities with the past also diminishes moral differences in the present between East and West. It begins to undo the Manichean vision. This tendency intensifies in Kassandra (1983) and Medea: Stimmen (Medea: Voices, 1996):13 underlying surface ideological differences between hostile states, the power that wages wars and oppresses peoples is at work in both. In Medea, a queen wanders nightly through the labyrinth at the center of the ancient city-palace down to a death chamber to weep over a dead child, sacrificed by a warlord on the altar of power. In Leibhaftig the labyrinth becomes an explicit leitmotif. Pervasive self-citation marks out Leibhaftig as a late work that creates a present space where the author’s past works meet and converse with myth and literature by authors in the labyrinthine canon, notably Virgil and Dante. The narrator has just had a stomach operation but must undergo a second intervention to finally remove the poison. The reader knows, however, that it is 1988. Allegorically, an operation to cure a sick body anticipates German unification, but also the final break with the GDR. This future shadow imbues everything with ironic meaning and poses the question of survival: can the woman whose life’s project has become so poisoned survive such drastic surgery? Wandering underground through the city in a fever-induced hallucination, the narrator discerns the word “MAUERDURCHBRUCH” (wall breach) written in dim letters next to a hole in a cellar wall between two houses that had been bombed in 1945 (112). But the letters on the printed page signal an uncanny breakthrough into the text of the extratextual future. Thus the present is swallowed up into a time-gap between a still unknown future and a known and terrible past. Two parallel figures, a former friend named Urban and the anesthetist Kora Bachmann, provide a negative model for what the narrator might have become and a figure of hope for what the future might bring. Urban began as a committed socialist, but went on serving a regime he no longer believed in and has killed himself: a projected persona, based on pretense, comes to overlie and finally to kill off the self. In Kindheitsmuster, self-subjection to power was explored through an uncanny game with dolls who pretend to be good but are really naughty. Nelly and her brother cruelly enjoy punishing the dolls but also learn from them the skills of collusion yet secret flouting of authority. Such identification with hierarchical power sustains the practice of instrumental reason: suppression of judgment as to the right immediate action in order to serve

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supposed long-term interests. But eventually, ethical equivocation comes at the cost of personal integrity.14 Leibhaftig displaces this process of identity loss into a male collaborator from whom the narrator has kept an ever greater distance.15 If Urban is an angel of death, on the side of life is the anesthetist Kora Bachmann, a liminal figure between past, present, and future. Kora inhabits the hospital labyrinth, a real and present place where the narrator is wheeled along corridors down to the body-scanner, a lurking Minotaurus (50). This frightening yet benign monster lives in the hospital, in the gray zone of everyday life where GDR people struggled and often succeeded in living together sociably. But anesthetist Kora, bringer of unconsciousness, is also the guide down to the infernal regions, as Virgil was for Dante, and Ingeborg Bachmann has been for Christa Wolf. Through the metallic tunnel of the scanner, the hospital labyrinth opens in the narrator’s dreaming down into city drainage and transport tunnels, utility lines and cellars. In this underground world undivided by the Wall, temporal divisions too become blurred in a tangle of interlocking spaces or “Zeiträume” (68–69). “Zeitraum,” meaning interval or period of time, is literalized. The underground “time-spaces” house present acts of remembering past horror and tragedy. Mirroring urban archeology spiraling down into the past is the inner labyrinth of the mind-body system. Multiple levels, the circles of hell, include the pulsing of blood and a racing heart, the ear tormented by hellish noise, the rising waters of unconsciousness awash with fragmentary memories. Or there are different evolutionary stages of the brain — this echoes the stripping down that Franz Biberkopf underwent in Döblin’s Berlin Alexanderplatz (1929).16 Once down below, Homunculus from Goethe’s Faust takes over from Kora. This eerie alter ego, symbolic of the aspiration to create art out of lived experience, recalls the narrator’s fear in Kindheitsmuster that the child Nelly is just an artificial construct or doll. As a fetus in a test tube who will not grow into a child, Homunculus also symbolizes the collective unborn: the potential millions who were not born to victims of the Holocaust or to the war dead. A murdered infant the narrator comes upon echoes the murdered child in Medea and the tiny frozen corpse Nelly held for a moment in Kindheitsmuster, when the first refugees arrived. There is a glimpse too of Tante Lisbeth and her Jewish lover, Dr Alois Leitner, echoing Tante Lieschen from Kindheitsmuster and the exiled Jewish doctor who sent food parcels from America in the hungry postwar years. A bugging device attached by the Stasi to an underground telephone switchboard echoes Wolf’s story Was bleibt (What remains), which caused such journalistic outrage in 1990.17 Leibhaftig evinces poetic mastery worthy of Daedalus in its mixing of internal confusion with aesthetic overview. But is there any way out from the pull of the past upon Ariadne and does not obsessive self-citation and intertextual allusion risk entangling Daedalus? The lines from Goethe’s

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Faust,18 “Alles Vergängliche ist nur ein Gleichnis” (15; All that must disappear is but a parable.) introduce the notion of the mortal body that, as locus of felt experience and of remembering, becomes a parabolic signifier of meaning inscribed, “leibhaftig,” in the flesh. But what sort of parable? Kassandra and Medea are allegorical texts: messages about the present shine through the mythic worlds in the foreground. But in Leibhaftig the movement is the other way round: today’s world forms the foreground and apart from the symbolism of an operation that may kill or cure, historical meaning in Leibhaftig needs no decoding. The responses to the Third Reich, the Holocaust, and the corruption of socialism are explicit. Whereas Kindheitsmuster remained silent about the Prague Spring, here the 1968 Warsaw Pact intervention is condemned. The messages are straightforward: grieving, confession of error, yet hope and the will to live. Urban represents the death of an ideology, but life will go on. Unified Germany, left empty of ideological prescription, is a space for future hope embodied in young Kora. But Kora Bachmann is also Wolf’s homage to a dead author whose spirit she strives to keep alive, just as the narrator of Nachdenken über Christa T. (The quest for Christa T., 1968)19 sought to bring a dead friend to life again through writing about her. Leibhaftig closes with two miniparagraphs like a two-line poem: Du sollst ja nicht weinen, sagst du. Das, sage ich, steht auch in einem Gedicht. (185) [You shouldn’t cry, you say. That, I say, is also in a poem.]

“Du sollst ja nicht weinen” is a line from “Enigma” (1969), one of Ingeborg Bachmann’s last poems. “Enigma” opens bleakly: spring will not come again, nor the good season of summer. But then come the lines: “Du sollst ja nicht weinen, sagt eine Musik.”20 [You shouldn’t cry, a music says.]

The music that speaks comfort is from the last movement of Mahler’s Third Symphony, where the women’s chorus sings the line. “Enigma” then closes with four one-word lines, “Sonst / sagt / niemand / etwas” (Otherwise / nobody / says / anything), lapidary words that echo Hamlet’s last words to his companion Horatio: “The rest is silence.” Bachmann dedicated “Enigma” to the composer Hans Werner Henze, and the poem surely also recalls that other companion and poet of silence, Paul Celan. So too Leibhaftig closes with a gesture toward a friend. Symbolic of

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the communicative value of literature, friendship is a perennial motif in elegiac mourning from Biblical and Classical times through to today. Too many labyrinthine passageways to be explored here open out from this cultural echo chamber.21 In the context of post-unification memory culture, however, a few points are worth noting. Bachmann’s “Enigma” stands at the edge of silence and despair, whereas the end of Leibhaftig is cast as continuing dialogue. Compared with Kindheitsmuster, mourning overtakes guilt as the defining response to the Third Reich. There is sorrow, too, over the corruption of socialist idealism by power politics. But society is not identical with the political regime. The sociability of the human animal that the ideology laid claim to only to create a monster will survive the end of the Minotaur. The hospital staff provide comfort, often in comic mode, and here even the Minotaurus is benign: science can give birth to monsters but can also be a force for good. Leibhaftig gives up on the narrative of progress toward a Communist utopia but without proclaiming the End of Enlightenment. Freud wrote of civilization and its discontents. In Wolf’s story, civilization in the shape of a literary culture of mourning offers salve for wounds inflicted by political history. As to geography, Leibhaftig pits the many voices and languages of European culture through the ages against divisive dogma. Such a perspective does not provide a program for unified Germany, but it does look beyond the Manichean vision of warring worlds.

Mazy Meanderings: Schulze’s Simple Storys and Adam und Evelyn Many aspects of Leibhaftig belong in a high modernist tradition of selfreflexive writing about writing. It exemplifies the supposed elitist, bourgeois formalism that Socialist realism was wheeled out to combat. The very form of Wolf’s story thus expresses rejection of stifling orthodoxy. By the same token, however, Leibhaftig might appear remote from the concerns of ordinary people, struggling to cope in the creaking GDR economy, who aspired to the freedoms and prosperity that West Germans enjoyed. Leibhaftig does have its wry moments, such as bursting surgical gloves or missing hospital bed-wear. But the ordinary staff of nurses and doctors tend to transmogrify into figures from Faust and, surprising for a text published in 2002, it conveys nothing of the decade since unification. The subtitle of Schulze’s Simple Storys: Ein Roman aus der ostdeutschen Provinz (A novel from the East German provinces) ostensibly offers something quite different: tales of everyday provincial folk or the Altenberg soap opera. In The Metamorphosis (1912) Kafka’s Gregor Samsa famously wakes up one morning suddenly changed into something different in a world that stays seemingly the same. Simple Storys conveys what it is like to wake

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up seemingly unchanged in a world that is suddenly different. In both cases, of course, self and world go on disconcertingly metamorphosing. The predominant tone of dry, wry understatement evokes anxiety and spatial discomfort as the inhabitants of the small town of Altenberg in Thuringia scurry about in a world where they have lost their bearings. Love affairs falter, young men turn violent, young women on their own struggle to look after children or are pimped by men trying to make business deals. The stories see-saw between painful memories of provincial life then and painful experiences of provincial life now. Some who held sway then collapse under the impact now of loss of status and hostility from their own grandchildren, yet others higher up in the pecking order then still flourish now. Families broke up then: a son at long last meets his father who went West decades ago, but the reunion lasts only the length of a coffee together. Families break up now: wives or husbands seek work in West Germany, leaving an unemployed spouse behind in East Germany. Press freedom turns out to be competition for the advertising that squeezes the news out of provincial newspapers, as party speeches once did. GDR bureaucrats disciplined those who did not toe the line then: a teacher lost his post and was sent off to dig brown coal. After unification East German academics lose their posts as West Germans take over: an art historian at Leipzig University ends up wandering about Stuttgart in a wetsuit complete with snorkel and flippers advertising a fish-shop chain. The parallelisms could imply that despite the cataclysm things have not changed or have changed for the worse. One set of links between stories suggests, however, that things were worse then and just might get better now, at least for younger people. In the opening story, Dieter Schubert, the teacher who was sent off to dig brown coal, grotesquely celebrates a historical victory over Ernst Meurer, the man who caused him to lose his post, by climbing up the façade of Perugia Cathedral to shout down insults. In a later story, we hear again of Dieter Schubert and his “Jagdschein als politisch Verfolgter” (153; his hunting permit as victim of political persecution).22 This is how Peter Bertram, his beflippered angler companion on a fishing trip, bitterly puts it. Once a high-ranking border guard, Peter is now a pornographer struggling to make an honest living. But past persecution has left its mark on Dieter. A secret affair in Berlin with young Jenny (that we hear about only posthumously two stories later) fails to rejuvenate him. Dieter’s new life ends in a heart attack. As he lies dying on the river bank, the corpse of the fish he had caught floats off belly-up down the river, having been held too long out of its element to let the anglers take trophy photographs. Nor has Dieter’s old enemy, Ernst Meurer, now in a psychiatric clinic after a breakdown, fared much better. Prospects do look marginally brighter, however, for Ernst’s son Martin, the art historian now reduced to advertising fish shops. Martin is last seen walking off with Jenny. They are holding hands to avoid accidents that the

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wetsuits limiting their vision might cause. They look like fish out of water, but are still in their element as human beings helping one another to find their bearings in a changed world. The older men, Ernst and Dieter, exemplify the damage done when identity is reduced to political role. Ernst, once one of history’s victors, is now excoriated as a guilty perpetrator; Dieter occupies the now enviable position of the once-persecuted victim. But the stories that create such either-or positions entrap both victim and perpetrator in the past, cutting off their vision of possible present and future directions. Martin and Jenny, though, may find a way through. The alchemy of style transforms a litany of miseries into a darkly witty and thought-provoking comedy. It is as if a once-enclosing labyrinth has been smashed open and the bedazzled maze-walkers are now staggering around among the fragments. As readers, we too stagger around. We do not know enough about what happened in the past or what is going to happen in the future to make sense of the present. What happens later casts light back, changing the contours of what were present happenings as we first read them, but that change in aspect when they become the past and we know what has happened since. We listen in on conversations we cannot make sense of because information is withheld till several stories later. Or things are never clarified. (Who returned Barbara Holitzschek’s shoe?) Are the stories essentially private and individual or are they typical? A woman is afraid she may have run over a badger, or perhaps it was a cyclist. A geographer’s thematic map might track declining wild life in Thuringia or brown-coal pollution (one putative cause of badger decline), or rising unemployment in post-unification East Germany (that prompts recourse in Thuringia to bicycles instead of cars). But all this would not tell us much about Dr. Barbara Holitzschek’s growing anguish that she may have killed Andrea Meurer. In more graphically emotive close-up than the academic disciplines, fiction deals in individual experience, though geographical and historical knowledge sets contexts. Yet the very form of Simple Storys implies epistemological questions concerning the power but also the limits of political geography and narrative history. Simple Storys does not radically deconstruct the foundations of historical knowledge; the suffering inflicted by an authoritarian regime ruined lives then and still poisons relationships now. But big pictures and master narratives may obscure how people lived and live their lives, or they can destructively twist people’s self-image and how they remember. Schulze sets his (far from) simple stories against polemical post-unification triumphalism. Much was wrong in the GDR, but people’s lives should not be defined simply by which side of a political border they were on, and free-market capitalism is not the Garden of Eden. Adam und Evelyn is a comic-melancholic retrospective on 1989 confirming this message. It revisits a historico-geographic revolution, but the magic moment is always shadowed by silent knowledge of socioeconomic

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problems to come once the euphoria has passed. Overall a delicate balance between optimism and pessimism just holds in this mazy tale of wandering confusion. The titular mythic names signify a parable about everyman and everywoman. Adam, a tailor, and Evelyn, a waitress, plan a holiday on Lake Balaton with their neighbor Sabine and her West-German cousin Michael. But Evelyn catches Adam just post-flagranti with Lilli (a curvaceously middle-aged Lilith) who had called in to be measured for a dress — Adam’s female customers usually tempt him and he generally falls. Evelyn rushes off in a rage and a VW Passat along with Sabine and Michael, while Adam follows in pursuit in a 1961 Wartburg along with pet tortoise Elfriede. The chase proceeds in zigzag as the pursuer gets deflected by encounters along the way, notably with Katja. Katja recently lost her papers trying to swim across the Danube, but Adam gallantly smuggles her across the German-Czech border hidden in the trunk. After various encounters in Prague and Budapest, they all end up on Lake Balaton with the Angyal family. Despite sundry fallings in and out of love with others, Adam and Evelyn decide to go West together through the now open Hungarian border, then travel on to Munich, where Evelyn signs up at university to study art history, her chosen field that she had been prevented from studying in the GDR. (This corrects any simple idea that art historians all flourished in the GDR only to get done down by West German carpetbaggers, as happened to Martin Meurer.) A few weeks later, Adam at last finds a job repairing shoes and they see the opening of the Wall on TV. The Biblical myth is a running joke: where is the Garden of Eden? Are Adam and Eve being cast out or are they escaping into Paradise? It’s a very fruity story, with apples and figs, quince and ripe pears. The iconic fruit in 1989 was the banana, which East Germans supposedly lusted after. But who would choose bananas over the delicious little black grapes of Lake Balaton? The travelers move from garden to garden, first in Altenberg, where Adam and Elfriede would happily have stayed. The camping sites en route are alternative gardens full of East Germans fleeing Communism, mixed with West Germans enjoying a holiday paradise of cheap booze. Confusingly, the fleeing East Germans sing “Auferstanden aus Ruinen” (Arisen from ruins), the GDR anthem. But as they roar out “Deutschland, einig Vaterland” (Germany, united fatherland, 182), the nation’s anthem is turning into its death knell. Next comes the Angyal family’s idyllic garden on Lake Balaton, then the Munich garden where Adam burns photographs of past loves. Overall these competing gardens appear as scattered bits of a huge maze or Irrgarten, literally a garden to go astray in. A two-way satire undoes utopianism, whether in Communist or capitalist mode. Generational and gender differences produce different discontents. In a feminist-inflected parody of the East German paradise, Evelyn enjoys the right to choose abortion yet not what to study and is

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more inclined to go West than Adam is, though remaining uncertain till the decisive moment at the border. Evelyn is older than young Katja, who is certain, to the point of risking her life trying to escape from stifling enclosure that, as she sees it, offers no future. Adam, by contrast, older than both women, lacks ambition for the future, preferring to stay at home in Altenberg and cultivate his garden. In this he is like his father. Born in 1933, and so too young to have been active at the end of the war, Adam’s father remained disengaged, neither joining the Party nor fleeing West. In his skeptical inertia, Adam has something of a latter-day Oblamov. The eponymous hero of Goncharov’s Oblomov (1859) was a lazy aristocrat, a superfluous man who did not believe in progress, nor that Russia should emulate the dynamic West. The superfluous man at the end of the twentieth century is a disillusioned East German, his iconic beast a slowmoving tortoise. Adam believes neither that the GDR was progressing toward Communism nor that the West is a paradise of freedom. Driving everyone out, or helping them escape, is West-German Michael with his archangelic name. A research chemist by profession, Michael claims that genetic science is close to overcoming the aging process: paradise regained thanks to the pharmaceutical industry. But the novel closes on a sour note. Evelyn’s clothes from the chain store are mass-produced, and there is no call for creative make-do and mend; it seems unlikely that the cobbler will flourish in a throw-away society where the lovingly preserved 1961 Wartburg ends up as scrap, leaving the VW Passat triumphant. Thus Schulze delicately indicates economic and environmental problems: snakes in the capitalist garden. In both Adam und Evelyn and Simple Storys the temporal values that prevailed in Leibhaftig are reversed. Viewed from above, the future does once break into Wolf’s text, but inside the labyrinth the past overwhelmingly predominates. In Schulze’s novels, by contrast, although the past does rise up, different people remember different pasts that do not knit together into an imprisoning labyrinth. In Adam und Evelyn, the travelers zigzag across Central Europe toward the monster event just round the next bend. The meandering movement evokes the geographical more than the historical aspect of the revolution to come: space predominates over time as the characters travel East in order to go West; more exactly, they travel South-East in an ellipse, through Prague, Budapest, curving back to Lake Balaton, then across an opened border into Austria, land of the “Ösis” (Austrians), before ending up in Munich. One lot of escapees even ask the bemused Austrian border guards what country they have arrived in. But we know where they are, we know that the way into the maze will lead to a way out, that the borders will open. We know what will happen on the large-scale, but as in Simple Storys, Schulze creates small-scale mysteries: the characters inside the maze lack our historical foresight, but we access their personal motivations only in retrospect if at all. The effect is to

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destabilize the present: as a liminal realm, does its meaning come fatefully from the past or teleologically from the future; does it come from private love affairs or from public events? The dual aspect of labyrinths and mazes signifies hermetic meaning: “a labyrinth asserts the presence of order in apparent chaos, if one can only see it.”23 But can we see it? What does 1989 mean from the perspective of twenty years on? Like Simple Storys, the very form of Adam und Evelyn poses an open question. A comparable question inside the story concerns the Hungarian uprising of 1956, the earliest historical event to impact directly on one of the characters, Herr Angyal, turning him for a year into a public hero or even, as his speaking name suggests, an angel of history. To prove it he has a photograph from the front page of Time Magazine of January 1957. It shows a young intellectual-looking man, head slightly bent, fingers loosely holding the barrel of a gun; “Hungarian Freedom Fighter” was the title underneath, and top right, printed as if on a ribbon, were the words “Man of the Year” (198). Borrowed from religious painting, the curling ribbon with motto conveys the angelic implication. But the triumphant press image obscures the real horror: daughter Pepi, short for Josefa, is named after Herr Angyal’s best friend, who was so badly wounded during the fighting that he had to have both legs amputated and then shot himself. And it also obscures the quotidian life that went on after the event: should Herr Angyal’s identity be entirely subsumed into the national myth? He gave up his studies, moved from Budapest to self-imposed provincial exile. But this is how he met his wife, a country woman, not like the intellectual women her husband knew in Budapest, as she deprecatingly remarks. What of the intimacy they have enjoyed, the children they have brought up, the garden grapes they cultivate? Does all this mean nothing? And what of Time Magazine as arbiter of meaning?24 The mythologizing image bolsters the myth of America, Land of the Free, when in reality America did nothing to support the Hungarians and a great deal to sustain undemocratic dictatorships all over the world. A resonant back-story underpins memories of the uprising. The remnants of the Kossuth flag Herr Angyal saved in 1956 from a house-search by the military is a cultural template that brings another uprising, that of 1848, into play and the Hungarian national hero and iconic fighter for democracy: Lajos Kossuth (1807–1894), Governor President of Hungary from November 1848 to May 1849. Herr Angyal would like to raise the flag again, if only once, for everybody to see; Adam, by contrast, speaks up for the quiet life and defends his parents’ political disengagement as an honorable stance; but young Katja understands the longing to raise the flag, to keep on trying. We know, of course, that Herr Angyal will soon be able to raise the flag again. But it is a sign of a skeptical perspective from twenty years on and of a preference for simple stories over grand narratives that Adam and Evelyn are

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not there on the night to be photographed on the Wall in heroiceuphoric mode.

Tales from Home and Abroad: Sparschuh’s Eins zu Eins, Strubel’s Unter Schnee, Wolf’s Stadt der Engel According to Yuri Lotman, a founding spirit in the spatial turn, historical and national-linguistic models of space feed into the conception of the world as an integrated whole that is characteristic of any specific culture. Hence the fundamental spatial sign is the boundary that cannot be transgressed, the binary marker that establishes identity through difference.25 The events of 1989 expunged the defining borders of European Cold War culture at a time when economic globalization, interrupted by two world wars, had been accelerating again.26 Not surprisingly, then, travel, European and worldwide, across once closed borders often features in post-unification fiction. Simple Storys begins as a busload of East Germans celebrate new times with a holiday in Italy. Munich is as far as it goes in Adam und Evelyn, though Michael tempts Evelyn with the Big Apple or Ipanema Beach. Free movement was a key promise of the geographical revolution. Privileged East Germans did travel, but typical destinations pre- and post-1989 differ: East German authors used to meet up with colleagues in Moscow, but now give readings in Egypt, as in “Zwischenfall in Kairo” (Incident in Cairo) in Schulze’s short-story collection Handy (Cell phone, 2007).27 In another story, one of Lotman’s boundaries, that between inside and outside, proves distressingly permeable as the eponymous cell phone keeps Schulze connected globally even inside his Berlin apartment. Wolf’s memory labyrinths move away in the postwar world from polarized judgments of good and evil, yet they convey too how blurring distinctions may threaten an integrated worldview and personal identity. Wolf belonged among those who opposed unification and hoped for a different way of keeping the humanist-socialist project alive. In Schulze’s two novels past monsters loom less large but disappearing spatial boundaries disorientate, as the magically sudden change, initially so welcome, leads more to neo-liberal economics than to left-liberal politics. This last section will consider three more novels to see how far a cultural East-West boundary remains effective even after the disappearance of Cold War divisions, or whether older cultural traditions are reemerging. And does 1989 as temporal break still generate meaning? Or are the times a-changing as new factors come into play? Tourism figures in all three novels: Sparschuh’s Eins zu Eins proposes inward tourism into Brandenburg, one of the “new” Bundesländer, but goes on to explore an ever older Brandenburg

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in search of a local Slavic inheritance; Strubel’s Unter Schnee leaves Germany for a ski resort in the Czech Republic, juxtaposing a troubled past history of Slav-German relations with present German-German tensions; Stadt der Engel crosses the Atlantic to the heartland of the oncerival world order. The title Eins zu Eins could denote a football result or the currency exchange rate that Helmut Kohl promised in February 1990. Or it could suggest a Germany still divided by a colon in the head. But it turns out to designate an imaginary map scale of one-to-one. According to Denis Wood, maps make present the accumulated thought and labor of the past; they are effective through selectivity, and they serve interests.28 A scale of one-to-one, by contrast, suggests a utopian desire for plenitude. But the land surveyor’s direct, sensual contact must eventually feed into selective representation if maps are to usefully, and critically, tell the wood from the trees. Eins zu Eins turns out to track various interests. Rather as Simple Storys eschews the one grand narrative, Eins zu Eins rejects the one big picture in favor of a loose sequence of East-West encounters and anecdotes of times past, each implying its own thematic map. “Memory Map” is Marina Warner’s term for a kind of writing about people and places combining travelers’ tales, aesthetics, antiquarianism, conversation, and memoir.29 Eins zu Eins is a comic satire in and of this mode. The initial interest is economic and cultural: to turn drearier bits of provincial Brandenburg into money-spinning tourist destinations. In 1999 the narrator, Olaf Gruber, joins a travel agency, founded in 1990 by a West German businessman, that had taken over a GDR map-publishing enterprise dating back to 1953. Olaf coins the term “Erwanderungen,” meaning walking tours that explore the interplay of history and landscape. The aim is to bolster local pride in heritage and attract tourist money (68). Thus Olaf proposes a tour of old brickworks in a region blighted by brown coal, ghastly 1960s apartment blocks scattered through the landscape, and now mass unemployment. Along with the premises, the agency inherited Wenzel, a highly experienced GDR cartographer. But Wenzel disappears and Olaf is sent off to look for him. Wenzel, it emerges, is researching Wendish pagan sites. The narrative is dotted by various virtual and actual maps, such as Olaf’s post-industrial walking map and Wenzel’s still sketchy ethnographic map. An actual map that Olaf consults, dating from GDR times, exemplifies role of cartography in “the nexus of power-knowledge that frames and shapes the geographies of the modern world,” to borrow Denis Cosgrove’s terms.30 Hunting was popular with the GDR elite. As a former head forester put it: “Hunting belongs to the people, but the deer to the politburo.”31 The GDR map simply blanks out the road to a hunting lodge and estate where the nomenklatura disported themselves. Now the lodge is a discreet health center for the new elite, business managers suffering from stress.

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Unemployed industrial workers and stressed managers signal competing meanings of work as a key element in identity construction, or collapse, in the new Germany. In the 1840s Karl Marx wrote of alienated labor as the defining feature of capitalist modernity, but in the 1860s W. H. Riehl’s Die deutsche Arbeit (German work) posited work as the essence of Germanness. In the racist discourse of those times German hard-working efficiency was set against “polnische Wirtschaft” (Polish sloppiness). Postunification stereotypes now contrast West German competitive enterprise with East German lazy spinelessness — Schulze’s Adam has traces of this. But in Eins zu Eins macho West Germans turn out to be alienated slaves to office hours (as was Schulze’s Michael) and would-be East German competitors (mainly men) suffer from catch-up neurosis and sexual dysfunction. (Cobbler Adam’s work-life balance may after all be preferable.) The various maps in Eins zu Eins in effect normalize unified Germany as a country competing for business in a global market and for tourism with the likes of post-industrial Bilbao or Glasgow, though with GermanGerman inflections. Other encounters evoke better-worse times when East Germans queued in a spirit of misery-induced camaraderie for spare parts or sociably bartered for DIY tools. Olaf meets a visitor from further back still whose family, once estate managers for the local landowner, fled to the West when, having labored to restore land ravaged by war, they were faced with 1950s collectivization. The returnee finds that the remembered image and present topography of his village do not quite coincide, nor is he warmly welcomed by locals afraid that he has come to re-assert property rights. The hunting lodge, too, bears testimony to past times and the survival into the twentieth century of Junker power, though it did briefly serve as a home for orphans after the war before reverting to occupancy first by the Party, then by the new business elite. Such encounters reflecting modern socioeconomic history punctuate a meandering quest, extending all the way up to Rügen, to find the ancient site where the sacred treasures of Wendish Rethra, destroyed in 1068–69, may be hidden.32 But the quest just peters out: “Manchmal sind wir eben Irrläufer” (279; Sometimes we are just maze-walkers). Reading old maps and studies, Olaf gets lost “in einem Labyrinth” (284). Eventually Wenzel turns up, only to die a year later: death of an East German mapmaker; end of an era. But Olaf still devotes the odd weekend to the Wends with Fontane’s Wanderungen durch die Mark Brandenburg (Wanderings through Mark Brandenburg, 1862–89) as guide. What became of the Wends, Fontane asks and answers his own question: they were by no means eradicated root and branch but mostly remained hereabouts, “und haben in allen Provinzen jenseits der Elbe unzweifelhaft jene Mischrasse hergestellt, die jetzt die preußischen Provinzen bewohnt” (424; and in all the provinces East of the Elbe have undoubtedly created that mixed race that now inhabits the Prussian provinces). With minor amendment, this could

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equally well apply to the East Germans. In Eins zu Eins superimposed maps that are not neatly isomorphic suggest multiple cultural layering and persisting yet fluid identities emerging from, yet not rigidly fixed by, historical and geographical spaces. The critique of past privilege and current unemployment indicates the survival into post-unification Germany of a socialist perspective that the GDR regime failed to be true to. Intertextual conversations with archeologists and with Fontane seek a way past the terrible history of Germany’s relations with her Slav neighbors through celebrating a hybrid German-Slav heritage in the Prussian provinces. A short-story novel like Simple Storys, or “Episodenroman” as Strubel calls it, Unter Schnee is set in Harrachov in the Krkonoše mountains — or Harrachsdorf in the Riesengebirge (Giant Mountains) — and as in Eins zu Eins different perspectives imbue the same place with different meanings. The setting echoes a long tradition of village tales that often turned on the arrival of a stranger who brings change. Here the stranger has multiplied into an army of tourists. Loosely related episodes allow for perspectival interplay between locals and visitors. But rather than polarized opposites, differences in generation, nation, language and gender produce a kaleidoscopic effect, and the one through-running story about a lesbian love affair moves beyond the gender binary.33 Temporal perspectives too shift back and forth to remember but without fatalistic determinism of the past over the present. The title of one episode reflects the non-linear structure: “Reihenfolge stimmt nicht, Die” (order is not right, The, 97). A center of silver mining and glass manufacture in the AustroHungarian Empire, Harrachov is now a Czech ski resort near the once Bohemian-Silesian, now the Czech-Polish border. The Slavic inhabitants — descendents of a once-subject people, liberated in 1918, dispossessed again in 1938 by an invading German army, liberated in 1945 by the Red Army only to be enclosed in the Soviet bloc, their subjugation confirmed in 1968 — now cash in on a more benign German invasion, this time of tourists.34 A new piste passes so close to elderly Frau Beran’s house that skiers have curved a path over her roof: “Alle fahren über mein Dach” (All pass over my roof, 26). The eerie hissing sounds from above are like a haunting by earlier invasions, making the house into an uncanny lieu de mémoire, or place of history remembered literally from below.35 For young East German Evy, however, Harrachov prompts innocently nostalgic memories of childhood holidays. For West German Vera, Harrachov is different again, exotically unfamiliar, then frightening when she gets lost in a snowstorm. Along with destinations, language skills differ. Evy knows that the landlady’s surname is Beran; Beranu, as Vera calls her, is the dative form, appropriate on a signpost but not in conversation. On holiday in Paris, expertise is reversed: Vera, the experienced West German traveler, irritatingly shows off to poor, deprived Evy. The troubled German-German

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love affair between Evy and Vera is juxtaposed with episodes about Czech locals, their past under German, then Soviet hegemony, and their current economic problems. In 1968 Frau Beran’s husband was left to die because the mountain rescue helicopters had been summoned for military duties in Prague. Now poorer locals cheat better-off tourists and shady property speculation is rife. Yet there is kindness, too, and life-saving skills when the storm comes. In poetic realism and the modernist canon, village tales often culminate in a sublime encounter with nature. This may bring an abysmal sense of existential nothingness: in Kafka’s The Castle, the hero K., waiting in vain in a snowy courtyard, feels absolutely free, yet such freedom is meaningless. But being lost in snow can induce exalted insight, as befell Thomas Mann’s hero in The Magic Mountain. In Unter Schnee, a magic moment of erotic awakening comes when Evy and Vera first meet: two bodies that crash into one another on the ski slope. Then when Vera gets trapped “under snow” during a storm, there is the moment of near death: “Wo du warst ist plötzlich nichts mehr. Absolut nichts. Es ist still und schwarz. Es ist Glück” (129; Where you were there was suddenly nothing else. Absolutely nothing. It’s silent and black. It’s happiness). Vera’s italicized words evoke an ecstatic nirvana. But such mystic liberation from being somewhere cannot last. To stay alive entails a return to here and now: to quotidian banalities and the tensions of different personal histories that Vera and Evy must live with. Folklore often features in provincial tales. Near the end, Evy and Vera get stuck in a traffic jam behind a car that appears to have a skeleton in the passenger seat. This turns out to be a trendily gruesome shop-window mannequin that will be dressed up for a folk festival the next day as the female companion for Krakanoš — German Rübezahl — the mythic giant and lord of the weather. Thus Unter Schnee closes in carnival mood as the locals sell myths in pastiche to the tourists. Unter Schnee shares with Eins zu Eins a mood of wryly melancholic romance. Both shift from exclusive obsession with German identity and both draw on myth and legend to summon up premodern space in postmodern times. Around 1900 Heimat discourse mediated between older loyalties and the new German Reich. The provincial novels by Schulze and Sparschuh, and Strubel’s mountain tale might be labeled neo-Heimat in addressing tensions arising from a political union that sometimes felt like a takeover. Wolf’s Leibhaftig, by contrast, is an emphatically urban novel. So, too, is Stadt der Engel, though the city is not Berlin this time but multi-ethnic Los Angeles. Visiting on a research grant, the author finds a space where exiled kindred spirits meet. The title juxtaposes German with the now global language and the text is scattered with “englische Sprachfetzen” (scraps of English), as Wolf self-mockingly comments in an interview on Kulturradio.36 Her limited English is a wry, through-running joke by an elderly East German out of her linguistic element. Stadt der Engel is clearly

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autobiographical, yet the dust jacket refers to the author’s new novel. In the interview, Wolf admits that alongside real people like Brecht or Einstein, the narrator is “Christa Wolf,” but other characters are a mix of different people or are invented. As in Leibhaftig, self-reference mixes with allusion to many other authors, this time mainly emigrés in Los Angeles in exile from the Third Reich, but also Russian and German authors Wolf met in the GDR or in Moscow. Brecht’s poems of exile and Thomas Mann’s diaries are frequent sources of quotation. Of Wolf ’s own works, Kindheitsmuster stands out. But Stadt der Engel differs structurally from Kindheitsmuster in a crucial respect: it is not a labyrinth, nor even a maze, but a potentially endless mosaic of fragments with no inside and outside and no center other than Los Angeles. “These fragments I have shored against my ruins,” to borrow from The Wasteland.37 A dedicatory quotation from Walter Benjamin signals this aesthetic: truthful memories should proceed not by reporting, but by delineating the exact place where the researcher took possession of them (7). The “Ort” or place in the first instance means multi-ethnic Los Angeles. Even more radically than in Kindheitsmuster, the text shifts from one paragraph to the next between disparate times and different people as Wolf visits various locations in the city associated with German emigrés — notably Leon Feuchtwanger’s house — and meets up with aged survivors and members of later generations. She visits poor Hispanic and black areas as well as opulent districts and up-market restaurants with fantastic views, sampling with wry enjoyment the American way of life — fabulous haute cuisine and beef burgers, margarita cocktails and whisky nightcaps. But Benjamin’s place also means the mental perspective or imaginative position from which the researcher excavates or remembers. For Wolf the end of the GDR was a traumatic loss, intensified in January 1993 when the Stasi story broke. The memories to be excavated concern her cooperation with the Stasi between 1959, when the East German economy was bleeding away through disastrous currency exchange rates and loss of skilled workers, and 1962, just after the building of the Wall. What at the time felt like cooperation under conditions of crisis threatened in retrospect to transmute into collusion at the cost of personal integrity. Following the opening of Stasi files in 1992, Wolf describes trawling through her file of forty or so boxes of papers and her sense of contamination and shame at the mentality they revealed in the servants of a regime that she herself had never quite given up on. More distressing still is the realization that she had forgotten all but the vaguest details of her own activities documented in yet another file that she was warned about just before setting off for Los Angeles. Such forgetfulness poses an existential threat by calling into question her ethical stance as a writer. Dr Freud’s overcoat signifies the therapeutic role of confessional writing, which Stadt der Engel surely is, but also the anxiety that Benjamin’s truthful memories may be inaccessible: there

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once was a real overcoat that a friend inherited from a friend and that probably once belonged to Freud, but it got lost or was stolen, so the substitute overcoat is not the real thing. Yet writing helps in confronting the author’s fear that her political ideals, the country she remained loyal to despite growing doubts, in effect her whole adult life may have all been a terrible mistake. Such fear comes with the threat to the subject when identity is reduced to a political role, as the newspapers’ polemics demanded. The mosaic structure of Stadt der Engel helps in resisting this threat. In the interview Wolf speaks of a “Verknüpfung” (knotting together) between the émigrés and the GDR. In an emotional rather than political parallel, the mosaic in effect positions Wolf herself as an exile from a disappeared GDR, like earlier émigrés from a disappeared Weimar Republic who came to Los Angeles, the “Weimar unter Palmen” (207; Weimar under palm trees).38 The litany of meals consumed conveys how life goes on; curiosity about other people relieves the pressure of personal memory; superb land- and seascapes refresh the eye; the more egregious aspects of inequality in the United States revive Wolf’s critical spirit. From time to time a black guardian angel flies in from the city of angels, rather as Kafka’s hero in Der Verschollene (Amerika: The Man Who Disappeared), dispatched in disgrace from Europe, took the name “Negro.” Such a gesture of identification with the oppressed, acceptable in the work of a Jewish author, may not be to everyone’s taste; the black angel could seem like a protective shield for Wolf’s self-image rather than serious engagement with racism in America. Wolf’s angel belongs in the ambit of Magical Realism, a mode that sets compensatory imaginings over against painfully intractable history.39 In an essay on angelic intimations and the end of the GDR, Karen Leeder cites Heiner Müller’s comment that angels are figures beyond hope and despair; they always turn up when there is no chance any longer that hope will be realized.40 So too Wolf’s angel, whose appearances at moments of self-pity or humiliation have a mocking undertone. Likewise, the encounters in life and literature with émigrés who suffered unspeakable losses and saw their country descend into criminal barbarity bring a sense of proportion: compared with victims of the Third Reich, or with the history of slavery or of indigenous peoples under colonialism, or with the exploitative economic relations marking global capitalism, her own loss shrinks in significance. And seen from Los Angeles, the locus of multiple overlapping histories, the GDR appears a small country on the other side of an ocean that lasted for only forty years. A narrative thread of sorts is the quest for “L.,” a mysterious emigrée friend of a now-also-dead friend from GDR times called Emma. Like Christa T., they are independent persons but also aspects of the author’s search for herself through dialogue with others: an exile from the Third Reich and a humanistic socialist in the early years of the GDR, they embody the twin ethical impulses that fueled Wolf’s writing from the

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1960s on. In the radio interview, Wolf emphasizes that encounters with, reminiscences of, and quotations from other people all stand in relation to her. But the literary pantheon is richly fascinating in itself and not only for what it reflects of Christa Wolf. Post-unification Germany is mediated mainly through faxed newspaper reports and the Anglophone press; descendents of refugees who once sought asylum in Los Angeles ask anxiously about the fate of asylum seekers in Germany;41 Stasi revelations mix with journalistic proclamations of the end of utopia. But Berlin is also the place where those who love her phone anxiously and where she will return to those she loves. Otherwise, however, Germany in the decade and a half after Wolf’s return from Los Angeles scarcely figures. Instead, she looks back to older times, grounding the self-punishing rigor of her conscience in protestant Lutheran tradition. The researcher journeys even further back beyond the early modern age of Luther’s Reformation and the colonization of America, to the Hopi Indian reservation in Arizona in search of a premodern culture with a relation to the environment different from the ruthless exploitation common to capitalism and Communism. But like Fontane’s Wends, or Sparschuh’s East Germans, for whom life goes on even after the disappearance of the GDR, or the inhabitants of Harrachov selling postcards of their mythic giant Kracanoš, the Hopi now sell handicrafts to the tourists in a world of ever greater mixing of peoples and cultures.

A New Sobriety The Marxist-Leninist philosophy of history adopted something of Hegel’s vision of history as a rational process. But the owl of Minerva famously begins her flight only as dusk is falling. The labyrinthine mode with its duality between confusion within yet transcendent order offers a literary medium appropriate to a cosmographic vision of a universe becoming more meaningful: those caught up in the process cannot yet see the meaning, but the aesthetic order of the text should mirror the utopian telos. Kindheitsmuster gestures ambiguously toward such an aesthetic, but Wolf’s authorial reflections, full of questioning and doubt, lack sovereign cosmographic certainty. In Leibhaftig the author takes farewell of the utopian aspiration that brought hope after the traumatic realization of the crimes committed under the Third Reich. Yet that lost aspiration still works negatively to intensify the sense of abysmal failure that casts a dark shadow over the present in a still labyrinthine text. In Stadt der Engel, by contrast, geographical distance enables psychological distance. In the radio interview Wolf suggests “Schacht” (drainage or mining shaft) as a metaphor for memory. But rather than being nightmarishly sucked downward by engulfing memories, as in Leibhaftig, in Stadt der Engel the narrator

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moves through the cityscape, across a pavement mosaic of present encounters with different people and their different histories alongside her own. The metaphor of the quest or journey is overlaid by the prosaic city travelogue: the quest for L. does not get anywhere much and the journey to the Hopi brings no great revelation. The other novels, too, convey the need to confront the past but also to face practical and ethical demands in the present. The genres and myths they draw on are ironized. Schulze’s provincial Heimat is less than homely, and paradise, fleetingly glimpsed, is neither lost nor regained. The romantic quest to find the Wends eventually shrinks into a weekend hobby for Sparschuh’s hero. In Strubel’s mountain tale no one dies a mystic death. Instead, the lovers prosaically catch their different trains, Evy back to Senftenberg, Vera to Mainz with a stopover in Prague. This essay began with the premise that 1989 marked a historico-geographic revolution, but it has reached the downbeat conclusion that, judging by the novels considered here, the age of heroic narratives is past. Symptomatic is the absence of the climactic moment: the novels lead up to or follow on after, but do not actually show the historic event. So too in Kindheitsmuster the narrator takes leave of Nelly in 1947, before the founding of the GDR in 1949 and the transformative moment of Nelly’s conversion to the cause.42 If 1989 is a historic turning point, then the novels considered here are critical both of what came before and of what followed. Wolf and Schulze center on individual rights and abuse of state power in the GDR; theirs is primarily a liberal vision. Sparschuh’s mockery of party leaders luxuriating in privileges inherited from class society while ordinary people struggled in a failing economy is more socialist in tendency. In Wolf’s novels the Third Reich looms large, yet it is virtually absent in Schulze’s and Sparschuh’s texts. This surely reflects generational differences: Wolf was born in 1929, Sparschuh in 1955, Schulze in 1962. Yet Strubel, born in 1974, does look back to the German annexation of Czechoslovakia in 1938, to external aggression rather than internal trauma, as well as to Soviet oppression. But if 1989 marks the end of an epoch, what 1989 might promise as a start date is less clear. Hence the sober mood in novels that welcome new personal freedoms but are critical of unemployment, alienating competition, and environmental damage, whether under socialism or globalizing capitalism. The revolutionary moment in political history is viewed with some skepticism, then. The impact of the geographical revolution in the cultural domain is more positive. A common feature is the decentering of the nation state and its old-new capital. Berlin predominates in Leibhaftig, but the other novels are set elsewhere: the small town, the provincial countryside, the Central European region, Los Angeles. Sparschuh’s provincial landscape echoes an East German poetic tradition that celebrated Lusatia, the mythical region of the Wends and now the area of Sorbian speakers.43 Lusatia, so Thomas

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Möbius suggests, became for GDR poets an alternative space from which to criticize industrial pollution, open-cast mining, and centralizing political power.44 The same cultural landscape now provides breathing space from the capitalist rat race for Sparschuh’s hero and a medium for imaginative reflection on the long history of human interaction with nature that has shaped and now threatens the environment. So too Schulze’s gardens in Adam und Evelyn. Journeying freely through Central Europe in company with friends from East or West, visiting the vineyards on Lake Balaton, the splendors of Prague, or the grandeur of the Krkonoše mountains, can be celebrated unambiguously. Encounters with Central European neighbors and German-Slav hybrid identity in the Prussian lands are set against racism past and present. So, too, the features of her Turkish father are discernible in Evelyn’s face. In Wolf’s two post-unification texts cultural geography extends beyond the nation to sustain a European or cosmopolitan sense of identity. In Leibhaftig Goethe predominates from the opening page with its echo of “Gesang der Geister über den Wassern” (Song of the spirits above the waters). Historically, Goethe was the presiding genius of the German Kulturnation and of the male-dominated canon in nationalist literary histories. Wolf’s Goethe belongs in a European landscape along with Virgil and Dante and side by side with a woman author who in her novel Malina imagines a Danube landscape, undivided by boundaries, that predates the advent of Empire and warring nations. In Stadt der Engel the real city becomes an imagined cosmopolitan space of exile. Cosmopolitanism and exile might seem mutually exclusive conditions: how can a citizen of the world be in exile? Wolf is not a refugee like the Weimar émigrés, of course. But in Los Angeles she recognizes many different ways of not being at home, whether political exile, social deprivation, or ethnic exclusion. Such fellow feeling, unbounded by national identity, might be termed cosmopolitan. To experience one’s own sense of loss alongside others in their different modes of exile signifies a continuing political will to change, not in the monolithic way envisaged by Soviet Communism, but so that people may come to feel more at home in some patch of the world. Some might call this “Gesinnungsästhethik,” a supposedly peculiarly German tradition of moralizing literature obsessed with politics rather than with artistic values or private life.45 The novels considered here show how people inhabit multiple overlapping political and cultural spaces, most intimately the spaces of bodily experience and personal encounter: sexual desire; the pleasures of eating and pains of aging; fear of death and grief for the death of others; the mystic experience of near death in snow that shuts out the world. None of these novels reduces identity to political role. But nor do they exclude critical inquiry into the interplay of politics, culture, and personal life that is mediated as much through subtle and witty formal artistry as through the stories they tell.

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Notes 1

See Karl Schlögel, Im Raume lesen wir die Zeit: Über Zivilisationsgeschichte und Geopolitik (Munich: Carl Hanser, 2003), 27. 2 Peter Heylyn, Microscosmus, or a Little Description of the Great World (1621), cited in Alan R. H. Baker, Geography and History: Bridging the Divide (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2003), 206. 3 Christa Wolf, Kindheitsmuster (Darmstadt, Neuwied: Luchterhand, 1977), Leibhaftig: Erzählung (Munich: Luchterhand, 2002), and Stadt der Engel oder The Overcoat of Dr. Freud (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2010); Ingo Schulze, Simple Storys: Ein Roman aus der ostdeutschen Provinz (Berlin: Berlin Verlag, 1998), and Adam und Evelyn (Berlin: Berlin Verlag, 2008); Antje Rávic Strubel, Unter Schnee: Episodenroman (Munich: DTV, 2001); and Jens Sparschuh, Eins zu Eins (Cologne: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 2003). 4 On geographical place, cultural space, and memory, see Aleida Assmann, Erinnerungsräume: Formen und Wandlumgen des kulturellen Gedächtnisses (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1999), 298–339; on recent German memory culture see Anne Fuchs, Mary Cosgrove, and Georg Grote, eds., German Memory Contests: The Quest for Identity in Literature, Film, and Discourse since 1990, 2nd ed. (2006; repr., Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2010). 5 See Jan Rupp, “Erinnerungsräume in der Erzählliteratur,” in Raum und Bewegung in der Literatur: Die Literaturwissenschaften und der Spatial Turn, ed. Wolfgang Hallet and Birgit Neumann (Bielefeld: transcript, 2009), 181–94. 6 On the charge of over-complexity see Ursula Ackrill, Metafiktion und Ästhetik in Christa Wolfs “Nachdenken über Christa T.,” “Kindheitsmuster” und “Sommerstück” (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2004), chapter 2. 7 On Nelly’s ambiguous nature see Debbie Pinfold, The Child’s View of the Third Reich in German Literature: The Eye among the Blind (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2001), 68–72; 125–34. 8 Penelope Reed Doob, The Idea of the Labyrinth from Classical Antiquity through the Middle Ages (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1990), 52. 9 See Manfred Schmeling, Der labyrinthische Diskurs: Vom Mythos zum Erzählmodell (Frankfurt am Main: Athenäum, 1987), 269–79. 10 On the net as labyrinth, see Umberto Eco, Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language (Basingstoke, UK: Macmillan, 1984), 81. All translations are my own unless otherwise credited. 11 Thomas Anz, ed., “Es geht nicht um Christa Wolf”: Der Literaturstreit im vereinten Deutschland (Munich: edition spangenberg, 1991); also Peter Graves, “The Treachery of St. Joan: Christa Wolf and the Stasi,” in Christa Wolf in Perspective, ed. Ian Wallace, German Monitor 30 (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1994), 1–12. 12 On the opening sentence paraphrasing a tag from William Faulkener see Anna Kuhn, Christa Wolf’s Utopian Vision: From Marxism to Feminism (Cambridge: Cambridge UP 1988), 106–7; 246–47.

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Christa Wolf, Medea: Stimmen (Darmstadt: Luchterhand, 1996); and Kassandra (Darmstadt: Luchterhand, 1983). 14 On the dolls see Elizabeth Boa, “Wolf, Kindheitsmuster,” in Landmarks in the German Novel (2), ed. Peter Hutchinson and Michael Minden (Bern: Peter Lang, 2010), 88–91. 15 This contrasts with Wolf’s Selbstversuch (Self-experiment, 1973) where a woman agrees to serve the state by being transformed experimentally into a man. 16 On modernist city labyrinths see David Kenosian, Puzzles of the Body: The Labyrinth in Kafka’s Prozeß, Hesse’s Steppenwolf, and Manns Zauberberg (Bern: Peter Lang, 1995). 17 Critics attacked Wolf for publishing her story of Stasi persecution in 1990 rather than in 1979, when it was written. 18 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust: Der Tragödie zweiter Teil, Werke, Band III, Hamburger Ausgabe in 14 Bänden, ed. Erich Trunz, 8th ed. (Hamburg: Christian Wegner, 1967), 365; Faust Part Two, translated by David Luke (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2008), 239. 19 Christa Wolf, Nachdenken über Christa T. (Neuwied: Luchterhand, 1969). 20 Ingeborg Bachmann, Werke I: Gedichte, Hörspiele, Libretti, Übersetzungen, ed. Christine Koschel, Inge von Weidenbaum, and Clemens Münster (Munich: Piper, 1982), 171. 21 See Monika Albrecht and Dirk Göttsche, eds., Bachmann Handbuch: LebenWerk-Wirkung (Stuttgart: J. B. Metzler, 2002), esp. 77–79. 22 “Jagdschein” echoes the term “Persilschein” that signified whiter-than-white in denazifying West Germany. 23 Doob, The Idea of the Labyrinth, 54. 24 See Roland Barthes, Mythologies, trans. Annette Lavers (Paris: Seuil, 1957) on press images of heroism. 25 Yuri Lotman, Die Struktur literarischer Texte, trans. Rolf-Dietrich Keil (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 1972), 313; 327. 26 Philippe Legrain, Open World: The Truth About Globalisation (London: Abacus, 2002), 108, cites global estimates for cross-border trade of 18% in 1914, 8% in 1950, and 25% in 2000. 27 Ingo Schulze, Handy: Dreizehn Geschichten in alter Manier (Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 2009), 129–66. 28 Denis Wood, The Power of Maps (New York: Guilford, 1992), 1. 29 See http://www.vam.ac.uk/activ_events/adult_resources/memory_maps/ what/index.html, visited August 4, 2010. 30 Denis Cosgrove, Geography & Vision: Seeing, Imagining and Representing the World (New York: I. B. Tauris, 2008), 155. 31 Online-NDR-Interview with Georg Lenuweit, accessed 4 Aug. 2010, http:// www.ndr.de/grenzenlos/bleiben/jagd106.html. 32 Sparschuh cites various authorities, notably Carl Schuchhardt, Arkona, Rethra, Vineta: Ortsuntersuchungen und Ausgrabungen (Berlin: H. Schoetz, 1926).

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Emily Jeremiah, “Disorientating Fictions: Antje Rávic Strubel and Postunification East German Identity,” German Life and Letters 62 (2009): 220–32. Jeremiah argues that Strubel sets nomadic and queer values against nationalism and heterosexism. 34 Wikipedia gives Harrachov’s population in 2006 as 1,696; the tourist webpage claims 700,000 enquiries! 35 On this term see Pierre Nora, ed., Les lieux de mémoire (Paris: Edition Gallimard, 1984–92). 36 “Claus-Ulrich Bielefeld im Gespräch mit Christa Wolf,” Kulturradio rbb, 1 Jun. 2010; repeated 7 Aug. 2010. 37 T. S. Eliot, The Wasteland, ed. Valerie Eliot (London: Faber & Faber, 1971), 146. 38 Wolf may have remembered the expression from Holger Gumprecht, “New Weimar” unter Palmen: Deutsche Schriftsteller im Exil in Los Angeles (Berlin: Aufbau, 1998). 39 See John Burt Foster Jr., “‘Magical Realism’: Compensatory Vision and Felt History,” in Magical Realism: Theory, History, Community, ed. Lois Parkinson Zamora and Wendy B. Faris (Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1995), 267–84. 40 Karen Leeder, “‘Glücklose Engel’: Fictions of German History and the End of the German Democratic Republic,” in Recasting German Identity: Culture, Politics, and Literature in the Berlin Republic, ed. Stuart Taberner and Frank Finlay (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2002), 102. 41 In 1991 and 1992 there were xenophobic attacks in Hoyerswerda, then Rostock. 42 Wolf became a member of the SED in 1949. The Wandlungsroman (novel of conversion) was an approved genre in the early years of the GDR. 43 Lusatia, German Lausitz, stretches through parts of Brandenburg and Saxony and into Poland. The Sorb language survives, thoughthe number of speakers is declining. 44 Thomas Möbius, “Landscape as an Interpretational Model: The Function and Tradition of Landscape Imagery in GDR Literature,” in The Politics of Place in Post-war Germany, ed. David Clarke and Renate Rechtien (Lewiston, NY: Edward Mellen, 2009), 127–48. 45 Ulrich Greiner, “Die deutsche Gesinnungsästhetik: Noch einmal, Christa Wolf und der deutsche Literaturstreit; Eine Zwischenbilanz,” in “Es geht nicht um Christa Wolf,” ed. Thomas Anz (Munich: edition spangenberg, 1991), 208–16. For Greiner, Christa Wolf exemplifies the tendency.

9: Reimagining the West: West Germany, Westalgia, and the Generation of 1978 Linda Shortt

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N A RECENT ARTICLE in Die Zeit a variety of contemporary German writers were invited to engage in an imaginative brainstorming on how Germany could possibly improve on its 1990 performance, should unification only take place now in 2010.1 While the question may seem quite frivolous, the answers proffered expose some of the intricacies and problems of the post-unification era, which is characterized neither simply by resentment and division nor by a homogeneous unified German identity, but rather by the dynamics of memory contests. Spanning a wide range of responses, from a playful “don’t annoy Christa Wolf,” or the suggestion of welcome money to entice die-hard “Wessis” (people from the west) to venture into the east, to more serious considerations that the constitution should be renegotiated, and that GDR dissidents should be included in the post-unification political order, the answers flag some of the mistakes and missed opportunities in post-1990 Germany.2 The suggestions are by no means homogeneous and in some cases they are also completely unrealistic. However, by revisiting and reinterpreting the period of transition and imagining an alternative path they bring points of contention to the surface, highlighting the creative potential of imagination. Mapping out a different road for unified Germany, they suggest quick resolutions to post-unification questions of landownership in the east, to perceived West German cultural hegemony, as well as to the completely foreseeable financial problems caused by the introduction of the Deutschmark in the east and the burden of the solidarity pact on the west. Casting an unsentimental gaze backward to the heated and anxious debates of the early 1990s, which centered on whether the capital should, or indeed could, be moved from Bonn to Berlin, Jens Jessen proposed a radical solution that would save the new Republic time and money in the transitional phase this time around. Bonn should simply be forgotten.3 In contrast to Jessen’s vision of a new Germany that is free of links to the old Federal Republic, which had Bonn as political capital, it seems clear that, from the vantage point of the present, the contemporary cul-

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tural scene has become increasingly preoccupied with the “old” Federal Republic, and with Bonn as a metaphor for this old political order. As the first section of this chapter shows, this interest in the Bonn Republic seems to be gaining momentum at the precise moment when this era is being consigned to history. A reaction to both domestic and global developments, this rediscovery of the Bonn Republic reimagines, reconstructs, and revises the “old” West, rescuing a version of this past and preserving it for the present, and challenging the “normality” of this present. The second part of this chapter analyzes Jochen Schimmang’s Das Beste, was wir hatten (The best we ever had, 2009).4 Concentrating on the lives of three members of the so-called 1978er generation (who were born in the 1950s),5 this novel examines the impact of 1989–90 on western identity constructs and concepts of belonging. A Wenderoman West (West German novel about 1989–90), it casts German history in a new “Westalgic” light, reconstructing West Germany as a stable, lived reality, and as a “home” for the 1978ers, rather than as the provisional state that unification made it. Reinterpreting Germany’s generational landscape, this “West German story” redescribes the 1978ers as a real political force that emerges in the aftermath of unification to defend its sense of place, which is rooted in the West. In this way, rather than confirming the official narrative, which emphasizes continuity — in 2009 Germany celebrated the sixtieth anniversary of the Federal Republic — Schimmang retrospectively invokes an alternative West German narrative, one that is defined by rupture and a defensive political activism. Effectively sounding the literary death knell for the “old” Federal Republic, he “writes back” against readings of unification as a West German colonization of the East by showing that the Wende (1989–90) also brought the West German Heimat to an end. In this way, the novel creatively contributes to the ongoing debate about the problems of transition and the place of the “old” Federal Republic in the new German order.

West Is Best? West Germany and Westalgia in Contemporary Germany In their writings on the resurgence of interest in the pre-unification Federal Republic, Stuart Taberner and Andrew Plowman have noted that the West German past has been undergoing a literary and cinematic reevaluation since 1990.6 This can be read as an attempt to turn away from the traditional postwar cultural referents of the Holocaust and the Second World War in order to create new points of cultural identification for a post-unity German identity. Using “other moments” of West German history to construct an alternative narrative, literary texts such as Uwe Timm’s

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Die Entdeckung der Currywurst (The invention of the curried sausage, 1993), and F. C. Delius’s Der Sonntag an dem ich Weltmeister wurde (The Sunday I became world champion, 1994) or the film Das Wunder von Bern (The miracle of Bern, 2003) reevaluate the postwar era, shifting the focus away from concepts of guilt and perpetration.7 Retrospective engagements with 1968 as a failed social revolution with positive sociocultural effects and with the period of German homegrown terror have also resulted in a literary reappraisal of the West German 1960s and 1970s. From the outset, this “red decade”8 provoked strong sentiments, polarizing the public. Despite the vast number of historical and fictional texts that have been produced in the interim, there is still no agreement on the institutional and political impact of this period. Opinions remain divided on the significance of 1968 for German democracy and on the real extent of the threat the Red Army Faction (RAF) and other left-wing extremist groups represented. Shaped by the political actors, the literary scene has been dominated by memoirs and (semi-)autobiographical texts that either inflate or deflate the achievements of this era. Examples here include Uwe Timm’s Der Freund und der Fremde (The friend and the stranger, 2005), Gerhard Seyfried’s Der schwarze Stern der Tupamaros (The black star of the Tupamaros, 2004), Peter Schneider’s Rebellion und Wahn: Mein 68 (Rebellion and madness: My 68, 2008), and Götz Aly’s Unser Kampf: 1968 — ein irritierter Blick zurück (Our struggle: 1968 — an irritated glance back, 2008).9 In the context of this particular memory contest, younger writers and filmmakers have also begun to engage with this period of upheaval, exploring its transgenerational impact. While Richard David Precht’s Lenin kam nur bis Lüdenscheid (Lenin only got to Lüdenscheid, 2005), which was made into a film in 2008, and Sophie Dannenberg’s Das bleiche Herz der Revolution (The pale heart of the revolution, 2004) examine the effects of 1968 on their generation, Christian Petzold’s Die innere Sicherheit (The state I am in, 2000) and Susanne Schneider’s Es kommt der Tag (The day will come, 2009) illustrate the impact of terror on the family unit and on intergenerational relations, simultaneously raising questions about the possibility of a post-revolutionary life.10 In the late 1990s we can see the emergence of another form of writing about the pre-unification Federal Republic. Centering on materialism, lifestyle, fashion, and pop-culture, this so-called Westalgic trend (evident in and attributed to works by Frank Goosen, Florian Illies, Sven Regener and David Wagner) adopts a more apolitical and sentimentalized approach. Depicting a remembered “West German normality,” this Westalgia seems to be a reaction to a conglomerate of factors. First, dissatisfaction with the reality of unification and the emergence of economic problems and instabilities led to a nostalgic longing for the “old” Federal Republic, which was rediscovered as a stable counter-present.

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Looking back to the pre-1989 period when the Cold War friend-foe schema was still intact and West Germany’s prosperity was not under threat, novels like Sven Regner’s Herr Lehmann trilogy (2001–8) and David Wagner’s Meine nachtblaue Hose (My midnight blue trousers, 2000) create a romanticized version of the West German past that is rooted in division.11 Second, this Westalgia is often linked to the emergence of Ostalgia. On the one hand, it may be seen as a reactive trend. Ostalgic films and texts that outline everyday East German life may have sparked an associative nostalgia for West German normality. Mirroring the style of Ostalgic texts such as Thomas Brussig’s Am kürzeren Ende der Sonnenallee (The shorter end of Sonnenallee, 1999) or Helden wie wir (Heroes like us, 1995), Westalgic books like Frank Goosen’s Liegen lernen (Learning to lie, 2000) and Florian Illies’s Generation Golf (2000)12 ignited a further backlash of Ostalgia, as they promoted a worldview that was oriented westward and which managed to largely ignore the Wall.13 However, this writing style is also rooted in global trends. Using familiar consumer products, music, fashion, and tales of childhood, adolescence, and coming of age to recreate an atmosphere of bygone times, and provoke associations, these authors adopt an ironic and trivial writing style which is, as Andrew Plowman suggests, similar in tone to international bestsellers by, among others, Nick Hornby and Helen Fielding.14 On the other hand, as Peter Thompson has noted, Ostalgia — and we can extend Thompson’s insights to its western counterpart Westalgia — can be read as a response to a widespread sense of instability, which stems from a general crisis of modernity in the 1970s and from the collapse of Communism in the 1990s. Since then the present has been marked by increased fragmentation, change, and the disappearance of the grand narratives, and many people have been robbed of the ability to look forward or to believe in anything. While Thompson reads Ostalgia as a “retrospective imagining of a proleptically imagined community,”15 placing it in a socialist frame of utopian belonging, it seems clear that Westalgia can also be described in terms of a longing for a remembered past where a secure future was in fact conceivable.16 Third, the pressures of globalization and the accelerated pace of life have also led to a resurgence of interest in and a preoccupation with the sheltered province of the pre-unification Federal Republic. These literary works mobilize an ahistorical Heimat discourse, writing West German places and subject positions back into the contemporary German literary landscape. Florian Illies’s ode to his hometown Schlitz in Ortsgespräch (Local call, 2006), which fashions his provincial homeland as an oasis of calm where dislocated selves can recharge their batteries, offers a fitting example of this. Frank Goosen’s Radio Heimat (2009) similarly engages with concepts of Heimat, investigating collective identity in the Ruhr

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valley, and exploring how the shifts in the local landscape and the morphing of industry and culture is currently impacting the Ruhr sense of identity.17 While Illies and Goosen both applaud Heimat, Andreas Meier adopts a more critical approach. In Onkel J.: Heimatkunde (Uncle J.: Local history, 2010), a collection of his newspaper columns, Maier explores Heimat as an endangered species in today’s world, outlining the ambivalences inherent in the concept, and exploring it as both a promise and a punishment.18 Finally, it could also be argued that the rediscovery of the “old” Federal Republic as a literary topos may be a response to the sea change that took place in the second half of the 1990s. As Herfried Münkler notes, the move from Bonn to Berlin and the switch from the Deutschmark to the Euro eliminated the two political symbols of the West German order.19 According to Münkler’s reading, these symbols had assumed a compensatory importance in the “old” Federal Republic, as West Germany had refrained from arming the nation with a foundational myth of origin. Thus the prospective disappearance of these familiar identity anchors seems to have provoked a sense of dislocation and a resurgence of nostalgic fondness for the old system. Although Jochen Schimmang’s Das Beste, was wir hatten is also preoccupied with the West German lifestyle — epitomized in this case by the Borgward Gregor drives throughout the novel and his mountain refuge, which overlooks the Rhine valley — it also marks a departure from the pop-Westalgic trend described thus far. Unlike these pop texts, Schimmang’s novel moves away from a sense of self based more or less solely on the aesthetics of consumption to reflect nostalgically on the politics and the political culture of West Germany, highlighting how integral the political is for identity. Rather than a purely complacent or passive wallowing, this nostalgic remembering ignites a form of activism, forcing the 1978er protagonists out of their comfortable lives and back into political protest. In this way, Schimmang’s novel conceives of a nostalgic remembering that aspires and, indeed, attempts to overcome its own inaction. This marks it apart from other novels in this genre. Reimagining the West German past through the lens of a unified German present that is trying to overwrite this past, this Westalgic reformulation of history revitalizes the atmosphere of anxiety that was prevalent during the period of transition. It plays the “old” and the “new” Federal Republic against each other, contrasting memories of a careful, moral, and circumspect Bonn with a horror vision of the Berlin Republic. In this way, it revitalizes the worries of the West German left about the emergence of the New Right, the effect of the relocation to Berlin on politics, and the acceleration of a normalizing form of nationalism in unified Germany, posing anew the question of their contemporary currency and relevance.

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The Bonn Republic — A West German Story? A highly constructed text, Das Beste, was wir hatten is a developmental narrative that interweaves aspects of a political thriller, a Heimat novel, and a romance. It juxtaposes real political players (for example, the politician Peter Glotz, a well-known Social Democrat), fictional characters (Gregor Korff, Leo Münks, and Carl Schelling), and fictional caricatures of real personalities (Professor Jerschel and Paul Schuster).20 Each of the main protagonists in this multilayered text plays an essential role in West German society, whether in connection with politics, security, or managing the past (memory). An influential political advisor in Bonn, Gregor Korff is a cog in the political wheel with close associations to powerful movers and shakers. He loses his position and this lifestyle when he is unveiled as the victim of an East German spy campaign executed by his West German girlfriend Sonja. His friend, Leo Münks, works for West German state security, assessing and monitoring the danger presented by the radical left. Carl Schelling, the third main male protagonist, is an archivist with a revolutionary agenda. A member of the anti-nationalist Gruppe August Reinsdorf, Schelling plans to blow up the Niederwald monument on the Rhine to prevent nationalist hubris from “contaminating” the unified German landscape. This explosive plot introduces an extra dimension to the narrative; both the Niederwald monument and Gruppe August Reinsdorf are connected to German unification in 1871. Decorated with an oversized Germania, the Niederwald monument was erected in 1883 to celebrate the formation of the nation and the uprising of the German people.21 Gruppe August Reinsdorf, meanwhile, is named after a German anarchist who attempted to blow up both the Kaiser and the Niederwald monument in 1883. By mixing historical reality and fiction in this way — a real monument with a real history and a fictional post-unification plot — Schimmang collapses the temporal distance and the historical difference between German unification in 1871 and 1990, tapping into the fears of unification skeptics who were worried that unification might spark a resurgence of nationalism. This West German story not only places the Wende in the narrative frame of 1871, but it also creates an imaginative geography of the West that is informed by, and anticipates, the post-unification competition between Berlin (West Berlin) and Bonn (West Germany). Creatively mapping out the political and emotive landscape of the “old” Federal Republic, it describes West Germany as dynamic, but cozy and provincial; by contrast the satellite city West Berlin, whose fate is sealed by its geographical position on the other side of the Iron Curtain (DB, 311), is stale, static, and unfriendly. This story is propped up by Gregor’s “romance of belonging” which, like the Freudian family romance, uses fantasy to create a narrative of ori-

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gin stemming from a moment where choice secures identity.22 Because Gregor grew up without a defined sense of place, his quest for belonging remains fruitless until he ends his flirtation with left-wing extremism in West Berlin to journey (geographically and ideologically) westward. Initially his sense of place is premised on a careful pride in West German economic success and in its political transparency (DB, 44). However, it grows into, first, a love for Bonn as an unlikely capital city that symbolizes rupture with prewar traditions and an unadventurous, middle-of-the-road and non-aggressive political mentality (DB, 87–88), and, second, an emotional connection to his country that is described in almost Biblical terms: “Dies ist mein Land, so fern und fremd. Dies ist mein Land, an dem ich Wohlgefallen habe” (DB, 49; This is my country, so far and strange. This is my country with which I am much pleased). This measured emotional attachment to, and sense of rootedness in, West Germany and its careful political approach is undermined by unification, which represents an identificatory shift away from an ethos of rupture toward a more confident, normalized nation (DB, 88).

Rehabilitating the 1978ers as a Political Force Creatively reinterpreting the role of the 1978ers in the German generational landscape, Das Beste, was wir hatten represents this cohort as a pillar of the post-revolutionary West German community that remains firmly anchored in the “old” Federal Republic after 1989–1990. It is also configured as a truly political force that is unleashed after unification when its sense of order is threatened. This imaginative exercise relies on a Schmittian political frame, which is prepared by the frequent references to Carl Schmitt’s life and political theories (in particular, to the notion of the decision-making sovereign and the partisan as a moral and defensive force) throughout the novel.23 Gregor is an expert on this controversial political theorist: he frequently reads the world through Schmitt’s theories; and their biographies are also linked, as both men become the victims of female intrigue. By refracting the protest actions through Schmitt, who enjoyed a popular renaissance among Italian and German leftwing students during the red decade,24 Das Beste, was wir hatten introduces another narrative layer, as it brings fictionalized activism in unified Germany into dialogue with the West German struggles of the 1960s and 1970s. These are then also retrospectively reevaluated. The stylization of the 1978ers as a generation with a political agenda in post-unification Germany differs considerably from the typical generational portrait outlined by self-appointed representatives such as Matthias Politycki, Matthias Horx, Reinhard Mohr, and Stephan Wackwitz.25 These representatives write the 1978ers into the role of the “Zuspätgekommenen”

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(those who arrived too late),26 who then become passive observers of the rubble of history in the post-revolutionary era. Too young to participate in the anti-authoritarian protests of 1968, the 1978ers were marked instead by the heterogeneous second wave of the student revolution. Beginning with the collapse of the Außerparlamentarische Opposition (APO; extra-parliamentarian opposition) in 1969, this second revolutionary phase was more radical and violent than its predecessor. In Das Beste, was wir hatten Schimmang traces the march of the 1978ers out of the revolution and into the institutions, where they become stakeholders in, and defenders of, the West German state. Highlighting their uneasiness in post-unification Germany, he resurrects and extends a position sketched out by Patrick Süskind in his 1990 article “Deutschland, eine Midlife Crisis” (Germany, a midlife crisis).27 In this article Süskind reflects on the sea change in public discourse, outlining his alienation from the catchy slogans of nationalist rhetoric and the talk of collective happiness and unified “Germanness.” Skeptical of this new tone, which had been out of place in the nervously politically correct Bonn Republic, Süskind consigns himself and his generation to the role traditionally attributed to senior citizens: Die eigentlichen Greise sind wir, wir 40jährigen Kinder der Bundesrepublik. Uns hat das Erdbeben kalt erwischt. Uns hat es bis ins Mark erschüttert. Nicht nur wegen unserer geschichtlich geprägten Befindlichkeit, der Tatsache also, daß wir eine andere als die bestehende Ordnung nie kannten. (123) [We are the real oldies, we 40-year-old children of the Federal Republic. The earthquake caught us unexpectedly. It shook us to the core. Not just because of our historically shaped sense of orientation: that is, the fact that we never knew any other order than this one.]

While Süskind writes his generation out of the historical moment, Schimmang casts his protagonists in the role of active protesters against the new regime that is trying to promote unity by eliminating their reality (DB, 309). In order to stand up to this threat of erasure, the 1978ers adopt three different kinds of protest action each of which is associatively linked with the West German red decade, namely violence and terror by irregular forces, individual inner emigration, and symbolic partisan action. In their post-unification campaign of violence against objects, Carl Schelling and the irregular Gruppe August Reinsdorf utilize protest methods that bear the hallmarks of both the early RAF operations and the “educating tactics” employed by Peter and Jan in Hans Weingartner’s Die fetten Jahren sind vorbei (The fat years are over; English title, The Edukators, 2004). Initially they break into houses and department stores, leaving behind their logo and a political message (DB, 223–24); however,

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their protest gradually becomes more violent, culminating in their plans to level the Niederwald memorial. Despite the fact that this is described in terms of an ecological intervention to protect the local landscape (DB, 220), the plot against the monument resurrects the debates of the 1970s as it raises questions about the suitableness of violence as a means of action, while also querying the appropriateness of the reaction of the state to this threat. In this way Schimmang’s novel creates an associative “genealogy of terror” that connects Schelling and the RAF; this can also be extended to include Reinsdorf, who was executed for his attempt on the Kaiser’s life.28 Telescoped in this way, the problem of the legitimacy of Carl Schelling’s plot gains new significance, as it could also retrospectively legitimize terror. Significantly, however, it is not the action per se but Schelling’s behavior during the trial that wins him popular support (DB, 264): like Gudrun Ensslin during her arson trial, Schelling refuses to speak about the action, repeating only the party line. As a result he is sentenced to five years imprisonment, even though another group member was sentenced to only three months for the same offense (DB, 255). The injustice of this sentence generates the second protest action, which stems from the political center. Gregor, Leo, and a close group of friends decide to “correct” justice by liberating Carl Schelling. In sharp contrast to the former Federal Republic, unified Germany is fashioned here as the enemy, and this enemy status, combined with the perceived “irreguläre und extreme einseitige Prozessführung” (DB, 261; irregular and extremely one-sided case) legitimizes this unlawful action. According to Schmitt, partisans and irregular forces cannot be described in criminalistic terms. Instead, they are a symptom of wider structural change and of the decay of a system of law based on particular forms, such as the nation-state. This opens a space where challenges to this order become legitimate. Seen in this way, the legitimacy of Schelling’s rescue could retrospectively justify the liberation of Baader (by Meinhof and Ensslin), as it creates a narrative where this kind of illegal act becomes permissible. However, this is critiqued by the further development of the plot: Schelling does not enter a life of terror, and he comes to the self-critical insight that a less radical form of action might have been equally effective (DB, 280). This critical assessment recognizes precisely the moral boundaries that Schmitt’s political theory eliminates. After his release Carl begins a new normal life in Holland under a new name. His “liberators” also return to a more everyday life. Leo takes early retirement, opting out of public service and withdrawing to the private sphere. Gregor meanwhile turns to a more playful form of agitation, one reminiscent of the strategies of the situationists and Kommune I (Commune 1), who employed spectacular actions to provoke a critical rethinking of social rituals and relations.29 In this way his protest inverts the order of developments during the late 1960s and early 1970s: while the protests of

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the red decade began playful and turned violent, Gregor’s protest represents a return to a more symbolic form of protest. Publicly attacking two apostles of the new order — Professor Jerschel, a historian who acts as a political speechwriter, and Paul Schuster, an ageing 1968er who trades on his revolutionary past — during a debate on social degeneration and normative behavior, Gregor plays the part of the lone partisan who is driven by individualist and moral values that were typical in postwar West Germany, but that are in conflict with the new collective normalized approach in the Berlin Republic. Despite the limited impact and relative harmlessness of firing paint-filled missiles, his protest is portrayed as a real political and moral action, and it is applauded by none other than the leftist anti-normalization intellectual Peter Glotz: “‘Nicht mein Stil, das wissen Sie,’ sagte er, . . . Aber trotzdem chapeau . . .” (DB, 299; Not my style, you know,” he said . . . But still, well done). This protest action is directly connected to an episode at the end of the 1960s that Gregor had witnessed but not participated in. During a meeting on the university constitution, two student rebels interrupted the proceedings, firing paint bombs at the university representatives (DB, 297). Despite his admiration for the fervor of the revolutionaries, Gregor’s politics had prevented him from engaging in such “kleinbürgerlicher Aktionismus” (DB, 298; petit bourgeois activism): “Genosse Mao, der ein Farbei warf: undenkbar” (DB, 298; Comrade Mao, who fired a paint bomb: inconceivable). In this way, his belated protest action retrospectively repairs this biographical oversight, allowing him an opportunity to exorcise the anxiety that has since defined him: “Als sei das damals nicht ganz zu Ende gebracht geworden, als hätte Gregor noch etwas zu tun” (DB, 248; As if that had never been completely finished, as if he still had something to do). Seen in this light, Schimmang’s imagined post-unification protest creates a fictional common ground for 1968ers and 1978ers; it is not what the 1968ers have become (embodied by Paul Schuster), but what they once were that unites them. This reading effectively deconstructs the established divisions between 1968ers and 1978ers. Overshadowed by their older 1968er brothers and sisters, who are conventionally viewed as the most courageous and politicized German postwar generation and who are collectively celebrated in leftwing discourse, the 1978ers traditionally fell into melancholy, defining themselves through a narrative of deficiency. This vision of the 1978ers as a dynamic force engaged in a belated protest action imaginatively evens out the playing field. Assigned a defensive role in the post-unification order, Schimmang’s 1978ers step up to defend “Das Beste was [sie] hatten” (the best [they] had) which, in this context, is not Kohl’s prospective “blühende Landschaften” (blooming landscapes), but their own “blühendes Provisorium” (DB, 44; blooming provisory state). Provincial, staid, and cautious, this was a place where expansive

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nationalism was paramount to treason: “Die Freude der Nation blieb gleichsam noch privat, bürgerlich diszipliniert. Man verfiel nicht in den kollektiven Rausch” (DB 136; The happiness of the nation still remained private, disciplined in a middle-class way. One did not fall into the intoxication of the collective). By mobilizing this conservative force against the normalizing and nationalist rhetoric of the Berlin Republic (personified by Jerschel and his vulgar red leather tie), Schimmang executes his own attack on the new German order, which ends on an ominous note: “‘Und Sie, wohin gehen Sie jetzt?,’ fragte das Mädchen. ‘Ich weiß noch nicht. Ziemlich weit, glaube ich’” (DB, 318; The girl asked: “And you? Where are you going now?” “I don’t know. Quite a long way, I think”).

Westalgia, Politics, and Patriotism Jochen Schimmang’s Das Beste, was wir hatten represents both a further addition to, and a new departure for, Westalgic discourse in the Berlin Republic. Engaging with West Germany from the 1950s onward, this novel pays particular attention to popular culture and the entertainment industry, recreating the everyday experience and atmosphere of this period through music, dress codes, cars, and food. Thus it can be aligned with “accepted” Westalgic pop narratives by Florian Illies, Frank Goosen, and Karin Duve. However, while these pop texts adopt a largely apolitical approach, Schimmang’s novel is highly political. Mobilizing conservative carefulness against a Berlin Republic which is perceived as exuberantly nationalistic and amnesiac, because it talks in collective terms and is not afraid of patriotism, Das Beste, was wir hatten portrays the unified German order as a “wrong” life where one can only live “rightly” by resisting it. Expressing a nostalgic longing for the safe political order of the old Federal Republic which insisted upon rupture, this novel resurrects an anxious discourse about the potential dangers of unified German nationalism. This may seem untimely and misplaced given the widespread national and international endorsement of the self-reflexive Berlin Republic as the best Germany has ever had. On the other hand, however, by exploring a nostalgic attachment to West Germany and its politics, Schimmang’s novel reimagines an alternative form of patriotism to the “partyism” of the flag-waving Berlin Republic. Thus reimagining the past and intervening in contemporary discussions on German nationalism, his novel highlights the creative potential of the literary imagination to create and test alternative perspectives on an old problem.

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Notes 1

“Deutsche Einheit: 20 Dinge, die wir bei der nächsten Wiedervereinigung besser machen,” Zeit Online, accessed 9 Nov. 2010, http://www.zeit.de/2010/39/ Einheit-20-Jahre. 2 On the problems of transition for a post-socialist identity, see Patricia Hogwood, “After the GDR: Reconstructing Identity in Post-Communist Germany,” Journal of Communist Studies and Transition Politics, 16, no. 4 (2000): 45–67. This has also been thematized in Jana Hensel, Achtung Zone: Warum wir Ostdeutschen anders bleiben sollten (Munich: Piper, 2009). On the continued problems of unification for German identity and society, see Jens Bisky, Die deutsche Frage: Warum die Einheit unser Land gefährdet (Berlin: Rowohlt, 2005); and Jana Simon, Frank Rothe, and Wiete Andrasch, eds., Das Buch der Unterschiede: Warum die Einheit keine ist (Berlin: Aufbau, 2000). 3 “Deutsche Einheit: 20 Dinge.” 4 Jochen Schimmang, Das Beste, was wir hatten (Hamburg: Edition Nautilus, 2009). Further references to this text will be given in the text using the abbreviation “DB.” All translations are my own unless otherwise credited. 5 This is the label popularly attributed to the generation of 1978 who were born into West Germany in the 1950s and socialized during the economic miracle and the international protest movement, which was exported through popular culture. For a synopsis of this generation and their place in Germany’s generational landscape, see Aleida Assmann, Geschichte im Gedächtnis: Von der individuellen Erfahrung zur öffentlichen Inszenierung (Munich: Beck, 2007), 58–69, esp. 63–64. 6 See Andrew Plowman, “Westalgie? Nostalgia for the “Old” Federal Republic in Recent German Prose,” seminar 40, no. 3 (2004): 249–61, and “‘Was will ich denn als Westdeutscher erzählen?’: The ‘Old’ West and Globalisation in Recent German Prose,” in German Literature in the Age of Globalisation, ed. Stuart Taberner (Birmingham: U of Birmingham P, 2004), 47–66; Stuart Taberner, German Literature of the 1990s and Beyond (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2005); Taberner, “‘West German Writing’ in the Berlin Republic,” in Contemporary German Fiction: Writing in the Berlin Republic, ed. Stuart Taberner (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2007), 72–107. 7 F. C. Delius, Der Sonntag an dem ich Weltmeister würde (Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1994); Uwe Timm, Die Entdeckung der Currywurst (Cologne: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 1993); Sönke Wortmann, Das Wunder von Bern (Germany: Little Shark Entertainment, 2003). 8 This term was introduced by Gerd Koenen. See Koenen, Das rote Jahrzehnt: Unsere kleine deutsche Revolution (Cologne: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 2001). 9 Uwe Timm, Der Freund und der Fremde (Cologne: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 2005); Gerhard Seyfried, Der schwarze Stern der Tupamaros (Berlin: Eichborn, 2004); Peter Schneider, Rebellion und Wahn: Mein 68 (Cologne: Kiepenheuer &

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Witsch, 2008), and Götz Aly, Unser Kampf: 1968 — ein irritierter Blick zurück (Bonn: Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung, 2008). 10 Richard David Precht, Lenin kam nur bis Lüdenscheid: Meine kleine deutsche Revolution (Berlin: Claasen, 2005); Andre Schäfer, Lenin kam nur bis Lüdenscheid (Germany: W-Film, 2008); Sophie Dannenberg, Das bleiche Herz der Revolution (Munich: DVA, 2004); Christian Petzold, Die innere Sicherheit (Germany: Schramm Film, Hessischer Rundfunk (HR), ARTE, 2000); Susanne Schneider, Es kommt der Tag (Germany, France: Wüste Film Ost, 2009). Further examples include Jess Jochimson, Der Dosenmilch-Trauma: Bekenntnisse eines 68er Kindes (Munich: DTV, 2000); Bettina Röhl, So macht Kommunismus Spass! Ulrike Meinhof, Klaus Rainer Röhl und die Akte Konkret (Hamburg: Europäische Verlagsanstalt, 2006). 11 Sven Regener, Herr Lehmann (Berlin: Eichborn, 2001), Neue Vahr Süd (Frankfurt am Main: Eichborn, 2004), and Der kleine Bruder (Berlin: Eichborn, 2008); and David Wagner, Meine nachtblaue Hose (Berlin: Alexander Fest, 2000). For a further example see Dorothea Dieckmann, Damen & Herren (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 2002). 12 Thomas Brussig, Am kürzeren Ende der Sonnenallee (Berlin: Volk & Welt, 1999); Brussig, Helden wie wir (Berlin: Volk & Welt, 1995); Frank Goosen, Liegen lernen (Frankfurt am Main: Eichborn, 2000); Florian Illies, Generation Golf: Eine Inspektion (Berlin: Argon, 2000). 13 This can be seen clearly in the case of Jana Hensel’s Zonenkinder (2002) which is written as an East German response to Florian Illies’s Generation Golf (2000) which had described the characteristics of the generational cohort that grew up during the 1980s and that had ignored the East. Jana Hensel, Zonenkinder (Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 2002). 14 Plowman, “Westalgie?,” 249. 15 Peter Thompson, “‘Die unheimliche Heimat’: The GDR and the Dialectics of Home,” in “From Stasiland to Ostalgie: The GDR Twenty Years After,” ed. Karin Leeder, special issue, Oxford German Studies 38, no. 3 (2009): 284. 16 Jochen Schimmang plays with this retrospective reimagining of the prospect of a secure future in Das Beste, was wir hatten. Reflecting on one of the many episodes which are proffered as “best,” Gregor is bemused by his own naivety. He had thought that life would simply trundle on as it had done: “Ich hatte wirklich geglaubt, der ewige Frieden sei angebrochen. Wenigstens für uns” (DB, 313; I really thought eternal peace had broken out. At least for us). 17 Frank Goosen, Radio Heimat: Geschichten von Zuhause (Frankfurt am Main: Eichborn, 2009); Florian Illies, Ortsgespräch (Munich: Carl Blessing, 2006). 18 Andreas Maier, Onkel J.: Heimatkunde (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2010). 19 Herfried Münkler, Die Deutschen und ihre Mythen (Berlin: Rowohlt, 2009), 9–28 and 455–76. 20 The eager Professor Jerschel, who is desperate to shape as well as study history, seems to be an unflattering fictional rendition of Michael Stürmer; Paul Schuster is

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an uncomplimentary Peter Schneider; Rudolf Seiters also makes as appearance as Gregor’s boss. 21 This is reflected in the monument’s inscription which reads: “Zum Andenken an die einmuethige siegreiche Erhebung des deutschen Volkes und an die Wiederaufrichtung des deutschen Reiches 1870–1871” (In commemoration of the unanimous victorious uprising of the German people and the reinstitution of the German Empire, 1870–1871). 22 The term “romance of belonging” was introduced by Victoria Pedrick in her 2007 analysis of Euripides’ Ion and Freud’s “From the History of an Infantile Neurosis.” While Pedrick uses this category to refer to familial origins, my usage in this chapter broadens its application to encompass the desire for Heimat. See Victoria Pedrick, Euripides, Freud, and the Romance of Belonging (Baltimore: John Hopkins, 2007). 23 Carl Schmitt, Theorie des Partisanen: Zwischenbemerkung zum Begriff des Politischen (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1995). 24 This has been highlighted by Jan-Werner Müller. Schmitt’s popularity was due to the fact that his theories legitimized actions that were outside of the legal order. See Jan-Werner Müller, “‘An Irregularity that Cannot Be Regulated’: Carl Schmitt’s Theory of the Partisan and the ‘War on Terror,’” accessed 1 Jun. 2010, http://www.princeton.edu/~jmueller/Schmitt-WarTerror-JWMuellerMarch2007.pdf, 1–23, here 2. 25 Matthias Politycki, Weiberroman (Berlin: Rowohlt, 1999); Matthias Horx, Aufstand im Schlaraffenland: Selbsterkenntnisse einer rebellischen Generation (Munich: Carl Hanser Verlag, 1989); Reinhard Mohr, Der diskrete Charme der Rebellion: Ein Leben mit den 68ern (Berlin: wjs, 2008); Mohr, Generation Z oder Von der Zumutung, älter zu werden (Berlin: Argon, 2003); Mohr, Zaungäste: Die Generation, die nach der Revolte kam (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1992); and Stephan Wackwitz, Ein unsichtbares Land (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 2003); Wackwitz, “Der Messias ist nicht gekommen,” in Merkur: Deutsche Zeitschrift für europäisches Denken 57 (2003): 93–105. 26 See Horx, Aufstand im Schlaraffenland, 29. 27 Patrick Süskind, “Deutschland, eine Midlife-crisis,” Der Spiegel, 17 Sept. 1990, 116–25. 28 Günter Gräwert’s film on Reinsdorf, Ein deutsches Attentat (A German assassination, 1975), also seems to play with the relevance of this historical episode for West German discourses during the 1970s. 29 Kommune 1 was the first politically organized commune in West Germany. It was set up in 1967 and it was based in West Berlin. Experimenting with new forms of social grouping, the commune was intended as an alternative to the nuclear family which was perceived as authoritarian and oppressive. For an overview of the history of Commune I, see Ulrich Enzensberger, Die Jahre der Kommune 1: Berlin, 1967–1969 (Cologne: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 2004).

10: “Dem Sichtbaren war nicht ganz zu trauen”: Poetic Reflections on German Reunification in Angela Krauss and Monika Maron Anja K. Johannsen

I

2009 THE WEEKLY NEWSPAPER Die Zeit published an article that discussed the question of which East German city was more entitled to call itself the heroic site of 1989: Berlin or Leipzig.1 Although the peaceful revolution actually began in Leipzig with the so-called Monday demonstrations, Berlin is generally regarded as the most prominent symbol of unification because of the fall of the Berlin Wall. This competition between these cities over which site deserves more recognition for its historical role in 1989 reflects the ongoing contest about how 1989 is currently being remembered. The dramatic events in Berlin — the fall of the Wall, the emotionally charged scenes of intense joy and reunion — offer a very different foil for memory than the Monday demonstrations, of which there are few photographs and recordings. This jealous rivalry between the cities has been further fueled by plans for a national monument to the peaceful revolution and to unification, which will be situated in Berlin, as the capital city, rather than Leipzig. Leipzig was so outraged by this decision to favor Berlin that it was quickly promised 15 million Euros in order to erect its own local monument. This chapter discusses two authors from East Germany, one from Berlin, Monika Maron, who is well known in Germany, and one from Leipzig, Angela Krauss, who is less renowned but certainly no less interesting. Although the events of 1989–90 play a decisive role in the literary works of both, neither of these authors is included in discussions about the so-called Wenderoman, the much-sought after and illusive novel about unification. In this chapter I will examine why these authors tend to fit less comfortably into this category than, for example, Ingo Schulze, highlighting how they seem to offer a special insight into a literary way of dealing with this past precisely because of this uncomfortableness. With one exception, all the prose works that Maron and Krauss have published since 1989 are set in either Berlin or Leipzig. Both authors are interested in the impact of history on personal stories and individual biogN AUTUMN

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raphies. This raises the question as to why they were not included as serious contenders in the quest for the Wenderoman. In the aftermath of the fall of the Wall, the Wenderoman emerged as a new genre in post-unification German literature, one that was expected to address the social and political tensions of unification in the 1990s.2 This new genre was rooted in Frank Schirrmacher’s scathing criticism of the contemporary German literary scene just a few weeks prior to the fall of the Wall. In an article published in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ), the influential editor and critic pronounced German contemporary literature dead.3 According to his reading, German authors, unlike their English-language counterparts, were incapable of telling entertaining stories about pressing political and social conditions. These comments ignited an extended debate among literary critics, authors, and editors, who disagreed on the merits of a seemingly apolitical German literary scene.4 In the aftermath of the fall of the Wall, the critics began a search for the Wenderoman, as its existence seemed to determine whether German literature was able to address the political transitions of the present. Nearly all German novels published after 1989–90 that were set in Berlin or in other east German cities were placed on trial and assessed according to their treatment of the topics of German nationhood and unification. Of course, there was generally no consensus on any of the books under discussion, and it became increasingly uncertain whether Germany was still waiting for the one and only Wenderoman or whether it had indeed already arrived. Both Ingo Schulze’s epistolary novel Neue Leben (New lives, 2005) and Uwe Tellkamp’s epic narrative Der Turm (The tower, 2008), for example, were either fêted or dismissed as examples of the Wenderoman, while Monika Maron’s novels were nearly and Angela Krauss’s completely overlooked because they apparently didn’t fit into the Wenderoman scheme. Arguably, this is symptomatic of the entire controversy, which essentially remained quite fruitless as it failed to generate a broader discussion about the relationship between literature and politics. The underlying assumption that literature has a duty to engage with the nation’s political condition head-on went unexamined. Furthermore, the debate implicitly rested on the idea that plot-driven realism is best equipped to tackle periods of accelerated sociopolitical change. Before analyzing how both Krauss and Maron test this idea, it is worth pausing briefly to examine another literary controversy that marked the post-unification period, the Christa Wolf debate. Centering on the publication of Was bleibt (What remains, 1990) and on Wolf’s role in the GDR and in unified Germany, this debate also raised questions about the relationship between literature and politics, specifically about the GDR and post-unification literature and politics. The debate was dominated by the polemics of influential West German critics, such as Ulrich Greiner, Frank Schirrmacher, and Marcel Reich-Ranicki,

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who coined the term “Staatsdichterin” (poet of the state) for Wolf. Although it brought the complex interrelationship of aesthetics, ethics, and politics to the forefront of discussions, the patronizing attitudes of West German critics who sat in judgment on East German writers created an overly polemical and heated atmosphere. Not surprisingly, the outcome of the flurry was a rather trivial insight: the aesthetic qualities of GDR literature should be judged separately from and independently of the author’s political entanglement with the state. Against this background of a post-unification literary scene that is veritably obsessed with the quest to find a literary work that comments on East Germany’s social and political transition in an authoritative and direct manner, this chapter focuses on oblique modes of literary engagement. It employs works by Maron and Krauss to argue that the literary form can in itself be political, outlining how both of these authors use their works to query the troubled relationship between literature and politics. Both of these authors were underrepresented in, if not omitted from, these early post-unification discussions. This chapter aims to redress this: it explores the thematic treatment of 1989 as a caesura by especially illuminating the political dimension of the meta-poeticity that is inherent to these texts. Unlike Angela Krauss, Monika Maron has been considered an eminently political writer ever since the publication of her first novel, Flugasche (Flight of ashes, 1981).5 Born in Berlin in 1941, she is the stepdaughter of Karl Maron, the third Minister of the Interior in the GDR. As it thematized the miserable working and living conditions in the industrial town B. which is easily recognizable as Bitterfeld, the center of the East German chemical industry, this book was censored in the East, but it appeared in the West. Despite this, a few copies of the West German edition, published by Fischer, found their way into East Germany. In the Federal Republic, where, after the foundation of the Green Party, the environmental movement was gathering pace, Maron’s story about the young journalist Josepha, who exposes the effects of pollution, was favorably received. Since publishing Flugasche, Maron’s main topic has been the relationship between the individual and society. The human being as a zoon politikon features prominently in the four books that appeared before 1989 as well as, in various ways, in the fictional works and essay collections published subsequently. For example, in her two most recent novels, Endmoränen (End moraines, 2002) and Ach Glück (Alas happiness, 2007)6 — a quasi-sequel to Endmoränen — the protagonist Johanna, a woman in her early fifties from East Berlin, finds it difficult to adapt to the new social and political order in unified Germany. Although she was not an active supporter of the regime, the GDR had allowed her to define her sense of identity through her professional role as biographer. For decades Johanna had tried to smuggle hidden political messages into the biographies she

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was publishing; in the post-unification era, however, she suffers, as she tells a West German friend, from her “unzeitgemäße[m] Bedürfnis, etwas Wichtiges zu tun” (untimely need to do something important): Früher war es wichtig, Solschenizyn und Koestler zu lesen und weiterzugeben. Es war schon wichtig, einfach nur gegen den Staat zu sein, mehr mußte man gar nicht tun, um wichtig zu sein. Natürlich war das eine ganz idiotische Wichtigkeit, trotzdem fehlt sie mir.7 [In former times it was important to read Solzhenitsyn and Koestler and to pass the books on to others. Even just being against the state was important, that was enough to be important. Of course, that was a very idiotic importance; nevertheless I miss it.]

Strikingly, the first novel that Maron wrote after unification, Animal Triste (1996; translated as Animal triste, 2000) seems, at first glance, to display much less interest in the human being as a zoon politikon than all her other books. This is precisely the reason why I would like to place it at the center of this analysis. As I will show through a close reading of the text, far from being apolitical, Animal Triste explores the relationship between politics and literature in a more complex manner than Maron’s previous works precisely because it appears to distance itself from political questions. The first-person narrator in Animal Triste is the only nameless narrator in Maron’s work. The narrative is told retrospectively from the perspective of an old woman who is uncertain about her biographical memories and who thus only reveals bits and pieces of her life story. For example, all we learn about her long marriage is that it ended when her lover Franz appeared on the scene. She does not dwell on her education and career, noting: Wenn ich mich richtig erinnere, habe ich einmal Biologie studiert, es kann aber auch Geologie oder Paläontologie gewesen sein, jedenfalls war ich, als ich meinen Geliebten traf, schon längere Zeit mit der Erforschung urzeitlicher Tierskelette befaßt und arbeitete im Berliner Naturkundemuseum . . .8 [If I remember correctly, I once studied biology, then again, it may have been geology or paleontology. Anyway, at the time when I met my lover, I had long been immersed in the study of the skeletons of prehistoric animals and was working at the Natural History Museum in Berlin]9

Her uncertainty and blurred memories about the details of her life that have nothing to do with Franz seem to correspond to her total lack of interest in politics. In this book, the reader is confronted with a narrator who seems to prioritize love, who declares at the outset: “Man kann im

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Leben nichts versäumen als die Liebe” (AT, 23; The only thing one can miss out on in life is love, ATE, 9). This strong thematic focus on emotional stirrings and events was perhaps quite unexpected; critics and readers may have expected a different kind of post-unification novel from Monika Maron, the author whom Marcel Reich-Ranicki had termed the “sober poet.”10 Rather than directly engaging with the political upheavals caused by the demise of the GDR, Maron’s Animal Triste focuses on a biographical disturbance that, at first sight, is wholly personal and apolitical: the narrator talks primarily about her “späte Jugendliebe” (AT, 56), her belated first love, which she encountered “in einem Alter, zu dem für gewöhnlich erwachsene Kinder oder sogar Enkelkinder, ein erhöhter Cholesterinspiegel und drohende Herzinfarkte gehören” (AT, 59; at an age that usually includes grown children and even grandchildren, an elevated cholesterol level and the threat of a coronary attack, ATE, 29). Reviewing Maron’s book, Reich-Ranicki praised this work, arguing that, unlike other GDR authors, Maron had not lost her topic with the demise of the GDR. On the contrary, he felt that she had actually found her topic in this novel, as she was no longer distracted by fighting Communism. Alison Lewis has since highlighted the shortcomings of Reich-Ranicki’s assessment, highlighting how this focus on love may also comment on and engage with historical and political issues.11 The narrator herself explicitly describes her detached attitude toward, and her marginal personal interest in, the historical and political background of her life story. Her decision to separate herself from the rest of the world and to live an isolated life after her lover disappears — to be the very opposite of a zoon politikon — is particularly manifest in her intentional destruction of her sight. She wears Franz’s forgotten glasses for years “und verschmolz meine gesunden Augen mit seinem Sehfehler zu einer symbiotischen Unschärfe als einer letzten Möglichkeit, ihm nahe zu sein” (AT, 10–11; and fused my healthy eyes with his weak eyesight into a symbiotic blur in one last desperate attempt to be close to him, ATE, 2). Her glance is now directed only inward and backward, which represents an absolute retreat into the private sphere. As Lewis also emphasizes, even if the narrator attempts to keep the dimensions of the private and the political completely separate, they are inextricably interwoven by the text. It is this entangling of the political with the personal that makes Maron’s novel such a fascinating Wenderoman. The tensions and asymmetries between characters become apparent on a number of different levels. Franz, a West German biologist from Ulm, serves on a committee involved in evaluating and assessing the museums in East Berlin. The fact that Maron sends Franz and his wife on a last holiday trip to the remains of Hadrian’s Wall in Scotland, which in ancient times separated the Romans from the Barbarians, is the least subtle hint

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that the two lovers are divided by mental barriers. But the novel outlines many situations where the political inflection of everyday life becomes evident. Maron describes the enduring mistrust between the lovers, which eventually prevents their love from growing into a viable relationship. In this way she comments on the mutual anxieties and tensions that marked East-West relations, tapping into the reservoir of resentment that according to President Richard von Weizsäcker marked German-German relations in the immediate post-unification period and that Germans needed to try to overcome.12 In a dinner scene, for example, we are offered insights into the imbalance between the characters. We learn that the narrator always buys the same three types of cheese, not out of preference, but simply because she knows their names. She conceals this social handicap because she does not want to seem unsophisticated. In another episode, Franz and the narrator are in bed, entertaining each other by singing songs from their youth; although they share a limited joint repertoire, the narrator does not know any church songs. She therefore sinks to her knees, fervently singing the Stalin hymn she had learned in school (AT, 104). Rather than bringing them closer together, this song widens the gulf between them, and she discovers something in her lover’s eyes that she interprets as a significant moment of alienation. With hindsight she concludes: Ich glaube, daß es ein Fehler war, Franz dieses Lied vorzusingen, jedenfalls es so vorzusingen, wie ich es getan habe: doppelt furchtbar, verdorben im Glauben und hemmungslos im Verrat. . . . Vielleicht hat er von mir mehr Scham erwartet für meinen fehlgeleiteten Glauben, und wenn ich mich schon nicht schämte, hätte ich mich selbst nicht so verhöhnen dürfen. . . . Franz glaubte auch nicht an den Gott, von dem er sang, aber er verhöhnte ihn nicht, ihn nicht und sich selbst auch nicht. Franz hatte eben das Glück, daß man ihm die richtigen Lieder beigebracht hat. (AT, 105) [I think it was a mistake to sing this song for Franz, at least to sing it the way I did: doubly terrible, abject in faith, and unscrupulous in betrayal. . . . Maybe he expected me to show more shame about my misguided faith. Or if I wasn’t ashamed, then I should at least have refrained from ridiculing myself the way I did. . . . Franz didn’t believe in the God of whom he sang either, but he didn’t mock, not God and not himself. Franz was just lucky he had learned the right songs. (ATE, 56)]

If we return to Marcel Reich-Ranicki, it is worth noting that the critic missed the crucial fact that Animal Triste does not really represent a departure from Maron’s writerly trajectory until this point. Josepha’s love for Christian in Flugasche, Rosalind’s love for Bruno in Die Überläuferin (The defector, 1988) and Stille Zeile Sechs (Silent close no. 6, 1991)13 all antici-

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pate in many ways the first person narrator’s obsessive love in Animal Triste, and so there is no real break between Maron’s first post-unification novel and its precursors. Nevertheless, aesthetically Animal Triste is a more autonomous work. Here Maron seems to achieve something she had not managed previously: while Animal Triste is, as I have shown, full of political reverberations, the political dimension is nonetheless much more subdued than in her earlier books. By choosing a politically disinterested narrator, Maron is able to highlight the inseparability of the political and the private in a way that would not be possible with Josepha or Rosalind, or even Johanna in the two later post-unification novels. Unlike its antecedents, Animal Triste does not have a political message in a narrow sense. After the Wende Maron could express her political views freely, and she began to publish essay collections alongside her literary works. This unburdened her prose, clearing the path for a new form of engagement with the political in literature. This implicitly meta-poetic form of engagement separates this novel from other Wenderomane that have received more critical attention. As the narrator explicitly notes, the fall of the Wall has been commonly associated with new symbols, such as passports, money, authorities, stamps, and street names. But these transformations simply were not enough: she longed for something cataclysmic, a rupture into which all these symbols and things would flow, “die fortgesetzte Bewegung in einer anderen Dimension” (AT, 89; the extended motion into a different dimension, ATE, 47), some natural disaster for example, “auf jeden Fall etwas, das größer war als der Mensch und sein wechselhaftes Streben” (AT, 89; at any rate something that was larger than human beings and their ever-changing desires, ATE, 47). This different dimension, this natural disaster that she has been somehow conjuring, seems to come in the form of an overwhelming and obsessive love. While Alison Lewis adopts a psychoanalytical perspective, reading the narrator’s relationship to Franz as an attempt to ward off the overwhelming changes in her life and thus re-anchor the self, my interpretation adopts a different perspective.14 Rather than a retreat from the political into the private, this relationship seems to represent a desire for a life that is not organized around facts but corresponds to what Angela Krauss terms “poetische Existenz” (poetic existence).15 This poetic dimension is the “other dimension” within which rigid structures disintegrate and securities yield to complete abandonment. What appears as escapism, a form of turning away from the political in the text, actually highlights literature’s potential as a means of conceiving a new form of existence and politics. By and large, the GDR functionalized literature. It has often been said that the mission of critical literature in the GDR was to establish a so-called Ersatzöffentlichkeit, a compensatory public. Readers regarded critical writers as messengers of a different world. Maron’s early works fit this image

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perfectly; this is what makes her such an important literary and political figure. However, political opposition in itself does not release a work from such functionalization — it only formulates alternate ideological meanings. Animal Triste, on the other hand, actively refuses and impedes political functionalization. Angela Krauss’s writing has been characterized by such refusal from the outset. Krauss has never been an overtly political writer. Her writing is marked instead by aesthetic autonomy, causing critics to focus on the aesthetic singularity of her work.16 Unlike Maron, Krauss never set herself in direct opposition to the GDR as a system. Born in 1950, she studied at the well-known Becher Institute in Leipzig, the first school for creative writing in German-speaking countries. Her first two books were published by the prestigious Aufbau publishing house in East Berlin and Weimar, which was the first address for East German writers.17 Like most of her later writing, Krauss’s first prose book Das Vergnügen (The amusement, 1984)18 carries no generic designation. To some extent, it seems to be a “Bitterfeld text,” a novel about industrial production. In line with the official GDR cultural policy, which was announced at the authors’ conference in Bitterfeld in 1959,19 Krauss worked in a factory for a year and a half before writing Das Vergnügen. Although she begins, like Maron, with a book centering on an old factory and a critical preoccupation with the demands of the state, Krauss sets her own tone from the outset. Taking factual descriptions to a new level, she opens a new poetic dimension. This can be seen clearly in the opening passage: Ein Tag, ein durchsichtiger Tag im September. In der südlichen Tieflandbucht leuchten die Stoppeläcker wie Gold, aus Stroh gesponnen. An solchen Tagen durchdringt das Auge selbst einen ländlichen Mittelwert des Schwefeldioxidgehalts der tieferen Luftschichten und trifft auf Grund. (7) [A day, a transparent day in September. In the southern lowland bay the stubble fields gleam like gold, spun from straw. On such days the eye permeates even a rural average value of sulphur dioxide of the deeper atmospheric layers and hits the ground.]

Marking her aesthetic position, Krauss offers insights into the combination of utopian promise reflected in the gleaming fields and reality in the form of the sulphur dioxide. In this way, the ambivalence of her descriptions becomes immediately apparent; determined not to close her eyes to the prosaic reality and drudgery of life, Krauss’s writing is sustained by her determination and her ability to discover a poetic gleam or glimmer, even in the shabby environment of a run-down factory in the GDR. While Maron addresses the question of environmental pollution, honing in on Bitterfeld with its polluted air that blackens white sweaters and ruins the

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workers’ health, Krauss announces right at the outset that the dirt in the air will not prevent her eye from discovering the golden fields and from hitting what she calls “ground.” Although this term is never really explicitly explained, it suggests that there is something under that which is visible on the surface that interests her. In one of her later books, Sommer auf dem Eis (Summer on ice, 1998), the narrator confesses: Insgeheim habe ich den sogenannten Tatsachen schon immer mißtraut, wofür ich mich schuldig fühlte. Dennoch mißtraute ich weiter. Ich glaubte nie an die Materie der Welt.20 [In secret, I have always mistrusted so-called facts, and felt guilty for doing so. However, I continued to mistrust. I have never believed in matter being the essence of the world.]

It is the Schein, this polyvalent German word that suggests the appearance, but also the glow, the shining; the Schein and not the Sein the factual being, as Marx said, dominates the mind in Krauss’s work. In her lectures on poetics she states: “Dem Sichtbaren war nicht ganz zu trauen”21 (the visible wasn’t quite trustworthy). Despite her tendency to mistrust visible phenomena, her literature makes no claim to a deeper truth that is hidden, invisible, or ultimately metaphysical. Instead, it is a special gaze, a more sensitive and careful way of looking that reveals the poetic gleam in a seemingly unpoetic environment. Unlike the narrator’s special gaze in Animal Triste, the “symbiotic blur” that was an effect of wearing Franz’s glasses, this eye that also sees differently is turned not inward but outward. In her lectures on poetics Krauss highlights how she deliberately challenges the reader’s sensibilities, using literature to unhinge words from everyday language in order to reinvest these signifiers with an original power that makes them glow.22 Her aesthetic principles have not really changed over the years. In comparison with Maron, her books are thin on plot: they are lattice-works made out of small and dense descriptions of everyday life, snap-shots, and fragments of memories. Since the publication of her third book, Der Dienst (The service, 1990), which deals with her father’s suicide, Krauss has repeatedly employed a nameless female first-person narrator in her writing. This narrator figure seems to remain the same from book to book, and the information about her life overlaps with Krauss’s biography. Thus, in her works we seem to be confronted with the deliberate superimposition of author, narrator, and protagonist. While Krauss’s aesthetic principles have remained the same, her central topics have changed. After Der Dienst Krauss published six further prose books and, in 2009, one first volume of poems; in five out of these six prose books the impact of unification is clear throughout.23 These texts are characterized by an unsettled atmosphere, which is accompanied by joyful departures and travels. This is particularly evident in two of the books,

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which deal with travel, Die Überfliegerin (The high flyer, 1995) and Milliarden neuer Sterne (Billions of new stars, 1999). However, in the three subsequent publications — Sommer auf dem Eis, Weggeküßt (Kissed away, 2002), and Wie weiter (Whither now, 2007) — the narrator remains in Leipzig or Bitterfeld but these are places which she barely recognizes since the Wende, as the following passage from Die Überfliegerin shows: Eines Morgens wachte ich auf an einem mir unbekannten Ort, der mit einigen vertrauten Zeichen sich stellte, als sei es der alte. Ein Verwirrspiel, das bereits fünf Jahre zurückliegt, und das zu durchschauen mir bis heute nichts genützt hat. . . . Wie alle hab ich ein paar Figuren eingeübt, die die Außenwelt über diese Tatsache täuschen. In Wahrheit taste ich, die Augäpfel nach oben gerollt, mit einem Stöckchen die Bordsteinkanten ab. (DÜ 39) [One morning I awoke at a place unknown to me that pretended to be the old one by using some familiar signs. A charade that has been going on for five years now. And even seeing through the game hasn’t helped me down to the present day. . . . Like everybody else I have picked up a couple of techniques to mislead the outside world about this fact. In reality, I try, with my eyeballs rolled upwards, to feel my way along the curbs with a little cane.]

Die Überfliegerin was published in 1995; thus the charade seems to refer to the post-unified German order. The dramatic changes since the Wende have forced former GDR citizens to practice special “techniques” in order to paper over their feelings of loss and moments of blindness that deprived them of familiar settings and certainties. Krauss positions herself as a critical observer of the reactions elicited by the transformations that took place in the East as a result of the circumstances of unification. Krauss’s characters are not irritated by the shifting circumstances, nor do they mourn that which has been lost as a result of unification; instead, they are forced into performing a charade, miming the new German identity, a mimicry which is quite similar to the narrator’s cheese selection in Animal Triste. Affected by the example of others, Krauss’s narrator tries to transform her feelings of being unsettled into action; her compatriots have become “Tatmenschen,” go-getters, and she decides that she needs to be a gogetter too, in order to avoid being left behind. Her first action is quite destructive, as she dismembers the old couch that used to belong to her grandmother. She eventually decides to leave Leipzig and go on a trip to the United States and to Moscow, stating: “Meine Zukunft irrt durch die weite Welt. Ich muß sie erst wieder einfangen” (DÜ 31; My future is straying through the wide world. I have to go and catch it). Although the protagonist seems to be affected by the increased speed of the new social and economic system in the globalized world, Krauss’s texts deliberately defy such acceleration. Her texts dwell on minutiae, weaving in flashbacks

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to childhood and repetitions of ritualistic activities — in Wie weiter, for example, animals are fed repeatedly throughout the text. Reflecting on her GDR and post-unification writing in an interview,24 Krauss noted that previously her work had intended to reveal the hidden current underneath a quiet and at times completely frozen and motionless surface. Now that times have changed, this slowness has been replaced by haste. Thus it becomes important to detect what she calls “the stream of life” under the surface and to put it into words. While such poetic slowness has always been Krauss’s main principle, after 1989 it gained more urgency in view of historical acceleration. The cover of Wie weiter shows pickup sticks, a popular game where the players have to remove thin sticks from a pile without disturbing any of the other sticks. This image captures Krauss’s poetics very well: Ich beginne die Sonntage mit einer Anhäufung von Mikadostäbchen auf meinem Bett. Was einst ein Spiel war, die Einübung der Zartheit zur Wahrung des Gleichgewichts, heute ist es ein Beschwörungsakt! Ich bitte um Stillstand, um Sammlung, um Verdichtung, um die Erfahrung der reinen Substanz! (Ww, 23) [I start my Sundays piling up pickup sticks on my bed. What used to be a game once, the rehearsal of tenderness in order to retain balance — today it is an act of incantation! I beg for stillness, for concentration, for intensification, for the experience of pure substance!]

The sounds of the animals in the zoo opposite her apartment provide the setting for this game. This is a typical setting for Krauss, one built up piece by piece, placing the pickup sticks player at the center, the animals in the background, and finally revealing the man asleep on the other side of the bed that she is sitting in. He is one of the organizers of the Monday demonstrations and she met him at a demonstration. Amid this description of a quiet and almost motionless Sunday morning, Krauss inserts a flashback to the busy weeks of the recent past, illustrating how this present stillness seems to stem from past turbulence. The immediate period after the fall of Wall is evoked as follows: Das waren die Wochen, als ich mich auf die Zartheit besann, sie war im Begriff, sich aufzulösen, zu zergehen in so feine Partikel, daß sie niemand mehr wahrzunehmen imstande war, weil was sich durchsetzen will, sie nie gekannt hat oder vergessen muß oder einfach vergisst. Anfangs aber hatte die Zartheit über allem geschwebt, als Achtsamkeit, Behutsamkeit und Staunen, wofür keine Zeit blieb, noch schnell ein Wort zu finden, ehe es über Nacht Revolution hieß. So hieß es also, machte verlegen, und überrollte die Verlegenheit und die Zartheit im Eifer des Gefechts. . . . (Ww, 43)

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[Those were the weeks when I thought about tenderness; it was going to disperse, to dissolve into such minute particles that no one would be able to perceive it any more, because that which wants to prevail has never known it or has to forget it or is simply forgetting it. At the outset, however, tenderness was floating above everything, as a form of attentiveness, carefulness, and amazement, to quickly find a word for that passing moment before, overnight, it was called a revolution. That’s what it was called, and it embarrassed us and crushed the embarrassment and the tenderness in the heat of the battle]

After the Wall fell, her lover, who had spearheaded the protests, fell silent, declining to speak while in the world around them life burst into busy activity. Communication became infected by “Sprechen als Urteilen” (Ww, 44; speaking as judging): instead of asking questions people proffered answers, favoring simple explanations over complex ambiguities, converting the act of speaking into an act of judgment. Krauss’s texts counter this form of language. Her literature unmasks the grand historical narratives that deprive the protest movement of its diversity and its polyphony of voices by labeling it a revolution. Her subtle prose works therefore enchant the reader by contrasting the historical meta-narrative on the fall of the Wall with countless alternative micronarratives. The French philosopher Jacques Rancière has explained how micro-narratives and their quintessential equality within a text may promote what he calls the new “distribution of the sensible.”25 According to Rancière, literature can create what he calls a “molecular equivalence of micro events,” defying a hierarchically organized world.26 Rancière highlights the importance of making the invisible visible, and of listening to those who have been dismissed as noisy animals or silent things — like the animals in the zoo in Wie weiter or the sofa in Die Überfliegerin that contains the grandmother’s entire life story. The power of literary texts consists in their ability to establish a different relationship between words and the things they describe: “Es ist ein anderes Sensorium, eine andere Weise, eine Macht der sinnlichen Affektion und eine Macht der Bedeutung zu verbinden” (a different sensorium, a different way of connecting the power of sensual affect and the power of meaning).27 His basic argument is that this different relationship between words and things makes a common world conceivable. This is literature’s intrinsically political power. And it is precisely in these terms that the Wenderomane or Wende texts I have discussed here are highly political.

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Notes 1

See Evelyn Finger, “Welche war die Heldenstadt? Vor zwanzig Jahren begann die friedliche Revolution: Berlin und Leipzig wurden zu den Schauplätzen des Herbstes 1989,” Die Zeit, 17 Sept. 2009. 2 See Fabian Thomas, Neue Leben, Neues Schreiben? Die ‘Wende’ 1989/90 bei Jana Hensel, Ingo Schulze und Christoph Hein (Munich: Meidenbauer, 2009); Lee M. Roberts, Germany and the Imagined East (Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars, 2009); Stuart Taberner, ed., Contemporary German Fiction: Writing in the Berlin Republic (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2007); Frank Thomas Grub, “Wende” und “Einheit” im Spiegel der deutschsprachigen Literatur: Ein Handbuch, 2 vols. (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2003); Heinz Ludwig Arnold, ed., Text + Kritik: Zeitschrift für Literatur, Sonderband IX; DDR-Literatur der neunziger Jahre (Munich: edition text + kritik, 2000); Stephen Brockmann, Literature and German Reunification (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1999); Jörg Fröhling, Reinhild Meinel, and Karl Riha eds., Wende-Literatur: Bibliographie und Materialien zur Literatur der Deutschen Einheit (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1999); Volker Wehdeking, ed., Die deutsche Einheit und die Schriftsteller: Literarische Verarbeitung der Wende seit 1989 (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1995). 3 See Frank Schirrmacher, “Idyllen in der Wüste: Oder das Versagen vor der Metropole,” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ), 10 Oct. 1989. 4 The main features of this debate are documented in Andrea Köhler and Rainer Moritz eds., Maulhelden und Königskinder: Zur Debatte über die deutschsprachige Gegenwartsliteratur (Leipzig: Reclam, 1998). 5 Monika Maron, Flugasche (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1981). 6 Monika Maron, Endmoränen (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 2002), and Ach Glück (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 2007). 7 Monika Maron, Endmoränen, 57. All translations are my own unless otherwise credited. 8 Monika Maron, Animal Triste (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1996), 15. Further references to this work are given in the text using the abbreviation AT. 9 Monika Maron, Animal Triste, translated by Brigitte Goldstein (Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 2000), 4. Further references to this work are given in the text using the abbreviation ATE. 10 Marcel Reich-Ranicki, “Der Liebe Fluch: Marcel Reich-Ranicki über Monika Marons Roman ‘Animal triste,’” Der Spiegel, 12 Feb. 1996. 11 See Alison Lewis, “Re-membering the Barbarian: Memory and Repression in Monika Maron’s Animal Triste,” German Quarterly 71, no. 1 (Winter 1998): 30. 12 See “Ansprache von Bundespräsident Richard von Weizsäcker beim Staatsakt zum ‘Tag der deutschen Einheit,’” 3 Oct. 1990, accessed 15 Aug. 2010, http:// www.bundespraesident.de/Reden-und-Interviews/-,12166/Reden-Richard-vonWeizsaecker.htm.

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Monika Maron, Die Überläuferin (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1988), and Stille Zeile sechs (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1991). 14 See Lewis, “Re-membering the Barbarian,” 43. 15 Angela Krauss, Die Gesamtliebe und die Einzelliebe: Frankfurter Poetikvorlesungen (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2004), 84. 16 See Astrid Köhler, Brückenschläge: DDR-Autoren vor und nach der Wiedervereinigung (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2007). 17 After unification Krauss switched over to Suhrkamp in Frankfurt. The first book she published in the unified country was Der Dienst (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1990). 18 Angela Krauss, Das Vergnügen (Berlin: Aufbau, 1984). 19 See Wolfgang Emmerich, Kleine Literaturgeschichte der DDR (Berlin: Aufbau, 2007). 20 Angela Krauss, Sommer auf dem Eis (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1998), 47. 21 Angela Krauss, Die Gesamtliebe und die Einzelliebe, 18. 22 See Krauss, Die Gesamtliebe und die Einzelliebe, 26. 23 Angela Krauss, Die Überfliegerin (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1995). Further references to this work are given in the text using the abbreviation DÜ. Krauss, Wie weiter (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2006). Further references to this work are given in the text using the abbreviation Ww. Krauss, Sommer auf dem Eis; Milliarden neuer Sterne (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1999); Weggeküßt (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2002); Triest: Theater am Meer (Frankfurt am Main: Insel, 2007); Ich muß mein Herz üben: Gedichte (Frankfurt am Main: Insel, 2009). 24 See “Die Realität zum Schweben bringen: Gespräch mit der Leipziger Autorin über die DDR, die Wende und die Wendeliteratur, über Bahnhöfe, Flugzeuge und Reisen, das Sichtbare, das Unveränderbare, das Politische und das Poetische,” Freitag, 13 Oct. 1995. 25 See Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible (New York: Continuum, 2004). 26 Jacques Rancière, Politik der Literatur (Vienna: Passagen, 2008), 40. 27 Rancière, Politik der Literatur, 26.

11: Cultural Topography and Emotional Legacies in Durs Grünbein’s Dresden Poetry Anne Fuchs

Dresden in the German Cultural Imagination

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N 2005 DURS GRÜNBEIN’S Porzellan: Poem vom Untergang meiner Stadt (Porcelain. poem about the demise of my city) appeared. The renowned Dresden-born poet reimagined in this cycle of forty-nine poems the destruction of the city from the position of the postwar generations, who have no personal connection to the event but nevertheless have been exposed to an omnipresent murmur about cultural loss. Its publication coincided with the consecration of the famous Frauenkirche (Church of Our Lady), probably the single most potent architectural symbol of civic democracy, unification, and international reconciliation in the German cultural imagination. Originally designed by George Bähr and built in the mid-eighteenth century, the church collapsed on 15 Feb. 1945 after the firestorm of the previous day. The ruin was not rebuilt during GDR times because the state had no interest in church property and the Lutheran church in the GDR had other priorities, above all to stabilize its precarious position in relation to the state. In 1990 a group of dedicated Dresdners founded the Förderkreis zum Wiederaufbau der Frauenkirche Dresden e.V (Society to Support the Reconstruction of the Frauenkirche Dresden), which launched a very effective national and international campaign to rebuild the church by emphasizing, above all, the redemptive function of the project.1 Accordingly, the response was overwhelming, and donations began to flow in from all over the world. In contrast to other building projects in unified Germany, the reconstruction of the Frauenkirche was not steered by the city, the Lutheran Church, the state of Saxony, or the Federal parliament: while all these institutions eventually supported the reconstruction, it remained first and foremost a citizens’ initiative. Because of this, the rebuilt church is now widely recognized as a fitting symbol of the enactment of a civic democracy dedicated to a politics of national and international reconciliation. The opening of the church on 30 October 2005 was broadcast live on German

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TV and watched by millions of (mostly older) Germans, who perceived this event in terms of the symbolic recuperation of their fractured cultural identity. A dramaturgy of remembrance unfolded that aimed to reconcile the memory of a traumatic past with the exaltation of a new beginning. In the cultural topography of unified Germany, Dresden is now firmly established as placeholder for this new culture of reconciliation, which is characterized by what one might call a “soft consensus” that violent warfare always leaves behind fractured personal, political, and cultural legacies that require symbolic healing. Some may argue that this consensus and the attendant German victim discourse have eroded the sharpness of historical analysis. Others hold that the time had come for the objective hardness of historical judgment to be softened by collective emotions that concern not so much a revisionist reading of the past as the recognition of loss and trauma. Against this backdrop the following chapter traces Grünbein’s poetic engagement with the symbolic currency of Dresden from his early collection Grauzone morgens (Mornings in the gray zone, 1988) across a range of Dresden poems to Porzellan. While, as we will see, the first collection offers harsh images of a decaying socialist city from a distanced point of view, the latter cycle explores the local memory culture from a postmemorial perspective. It foregrounds the enormous affective power of a transgenerational memory, passed down to him by the female members of his family, about the destruction of the city. In sharp contrast to Grauzone morgens, Porzellan is characterized by a nostalgic yet ironic tonality that conveys the poet’s vicarious affiliation with and yet critical distance from Dresden as a site of collective memory. In this way the cycle makes visible a circuit of exchange between cultural topography and deep-seated emotional legacies that engender contradictory responses.

From Dresdengrad to Pompeii Grünbein’s first collection, Grauzone morgens, offered daring images of a collapsing socialist society from the perspective of an early riser who, walking through the streets of Dresden’s damaged postwar landscape, evokes the atrophy of the system in stark images of grayness, decay, and poisonous pollution.2 The three decades from the 1960s — Grünbein was born in Dresden in 1962 — to the late 1980s represent for this self a period of utter stagnation, captured in the laconic line: “3 Jahrzehnte mit einer Hoffnung im Off . . .” (Gm, 16; three decades with hope off-stage). A programmatic anti-flâneur par excellence, Grünbein’s city walker expects no visual spectacles that could appeal to his senses. Instead he traverses a “Grauzonenlandschaft” (Gm, 22; gray zoned landscape) where every-

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thing appears as a “toter Wirrwarr abgestandner Bilder” (Gm, 22; dead clutter of stale images) and where the soot of the coal-burning power plant rains on erloschene Männer allein oder gruppenweise palavernd, die Schemen verbrauchter Frauen vorm Bahnhofsklo (Gm, 20) [dead men alone or in groups chatting, the specters of used-up women outside the loo of the railway station.]

Evidently the Dresden in this collection is no Florence on the Elbe but a dead and polluted city that has lost its urban vitality. In the eyes of this self, the socialist rebuilding program in particular epitomizes a form of symbolic warfare during the Cold War that calls attention to the unbroken power of Stalinist principles: Entlang der Straßen tobt architektonischer Krieg, stalineske Fassaden, an denen noch immer kein Riß sichtbar wird (Gm, 22) [Along the streets an architectural war rages Stalinist façades which still show no cracks.]

At the end of the 1980s, the self feels trapped in an aging city that had been “grausam zurückgebombt” (Gm, 40; brutally bombed back) into a “kaltes Jahrhundert der Müdigkeit” (Gm, 40; a cold century of tiredness,). Four decades after the war Dresden comes into view as an industrial landscape of destruction that has been doubly wrecked by defunct socialist industries and the war. Published before the fall of the Wall, Grauzone morgens marked the beginning of Grünbein’s enduring engagement with Dresden as the most symbolic site of the memory of the Second World War. While Grünbein later dismissed this collection as a youthful aberration into primitive prose verse, he acknowledged nevertheless that the poems had communicated the stagnant socialist reality of the 1980s.3 Following his mentor Heiner Müller, he sees the value of these snapshots of “Dresdengrad” in the portrayal of the “Einbruch Sowjetrußlands in die Alltagskultur Dresdens” (break-in of Soviet Russia into Dresden’s everyday world).4 For Günbein Grauzone morgens is a “Dokument aus der Spätzeit der sogenannten DDR-Literatur” (a document of the late period of the so-called GDR literature) that appeared to the poet later like the alien voice of a different

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author. However, his preoccupation with Dresden’s cultural topography remained. The acclaimed collection Schädelbasislektion (Basic Lessons about skulls / skull crash course, 1991) contained the poem ‘Gedicht über Dresden’ (Poem about Dresden), which evokes Dresden as a “scheintote Stadt, Barockwrack an der Elbe” (seemingly dead city, the Baroque wreck on the Elbe).5 Although this poem enlists a repertoire of images that have fueled the memory of Dresden throughout the postwar period, it defies nostalgia. Citations of established cultural templates, such as a reference to Dresden’s silhouette or to the “Balkon Europas” (Balcony of Europe) — the term coined by Frederick the Great for Brühl’s Terrace — occur here as fragments of a lost wholeness, which can no longer be pieced together. However, what appears now as a mere “Suchbild, / Ein Puzzle, königlich” (a phantom image, a royal jigsaw puzzle) is not just the shattered legacy of the Baroque masters. It is also ein Werk des Malerlehrlings mit dem in Wien verstümperten Talent Der halb Europa seine Stilbruch aufzwang [a work of the apprentice painter his talent botched in Vienna who enforced a change of style on half of Europe.]

By reminding his audience of Hitler’s failed career as a Viennese painter, Grünbein overturns the idea that any cultural heritage can be innocent and untouched by ideology and politics, a key trope that has defined the Dresden narrative throughout the postwar period. The naive conception of culture as an apolitical realm is further challenged by Grünbein’s provocative application of metaphors of art production to the carpet bombing: he represents the air-raids as a Technik flächendeckender Radierung Durch fremde Bomber, Meister ihres Fachs [a technique of surface-covering etching by alien bombers, masters of their craft]

In the German original the term “Radierung” not only refers to an etching but also connotes the notion of “ausradieren,” which means to erase and to annihilate. “Ausradieren” was a key term in the National Socialist vocabulary: enemies were no longer to be captured but annihilated. The superimposition of the two meanings reminds his reader of another facet of Nazi ideology: the Nazi concept of art as an instrument of ideological subjection and intimidation. Hitler’s and Speer’s megalomaniac plans for Berlin, which aimed to turn the city into an oversized stage for the

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performance of Nazi power, are prime examples, alluded to at the end of the poem. Grünbein cites Hitler’s architect Speer and his morbid notion of the future “Ruinenwert” (ruin value) of Nazi architecture in order to highlight the real origins of Dresden’s physical and cultural ruination:6 Nach Tausend Jahren noch, groß im Verfall Die Schönheit der Ruinen, ihr Ruinenwert. [After a thousand years, still great in their decay the beauty of ruins, their ruin value.]

By reminding his readership of the Nazis’ pathological urge to determine the most distant future, the poem reinstates historical causality: it is not the Allied bombers who are responsible for the city’s ruination but National Socialism. As Rolf Goebel argues, a further feature that adds to the poem’s complexity is its discursive context: the debate about the reconstruction of Dresden’s city center after unification. The city eagerly promoted historical reconstruction in order to recuperate the aesthetic effect of the Baroque silhouette, which would also symbolize the recovery from trauma. “Grünbein’s text,” Goebel comments, subordinates this same artistic totality to the continued legacy of National Socialism and allied bombing. Their technocratic perversion of Romantic art, directly resulting in Dresden’s irreparable destruction, relegates the ideal of an urban Gesamtkunstwerk irretrievably to the past, thus countering official Dresden’s promotion of the same ideal as something that can be rescued through contemporary technologies of archaeological reconstruction.7

The rejection of such restorative nostalgia also characterizes the eleven Dresden poems entitled “Europa nach dem letzten Regen” (Europe after the last Rain), published in the 1999 collection Nach den Satiren (After the satires).8 However, although Dresden is represented once more as a disembodied city — the first poem opens with the lines Raumlos, Erinnerung . . . und keine Stadt An die man sich heimkehrend halten kann (NdS, 143) [Non-spatial, memory . . . and no city To hang on to on one’s return home]

— Grünbein strikes a very different tone in these poems. Not only has his poetry turned to formal features that play with various rhymes and regular meter, but he now also incorporates first-hand and gendered experiences of the bombings.9 For example, the sixth poem, which is dedicated to his grandmother, reenacts the first two air-attacks from her point of view as a

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hospital patient suffering from scarlet fever. The figure of the young woman embodies the very idea of civilian vulnerability. Accordingly, as the attack unfolds, the hospital patients are described as ghost-like figures in white gowns running for their lives down to the river Elbe. Gespenster, die im weißen Nachthemd spuken Rannten sie barfuß an die Elbwiesen. . . . Panik, ein Luftstrom aus den Feuerluken, bevor aus allen Wolken die Posauen bliesen. (NdS, 148) [Ghosts spooking in white night gowns They ran barefoot to the Elbe meadows. . . . Panic, an air stream from the fire skylight before the trumpets blew from all clouds.]

In contrast to the distanced and analytical perspective of the earlier “Gedicht über Dresden,” the poetic self here adopts a point of view that empathizes with his protagonists. These gown-wearing patients appear as victims of a force that is evoked as a nemesis, descending with trumpets from the clouds. Here Grünbein comes close to remythologizing the bombing through metaphors and a tonality that aligns the event with the tragic grandeur of Biblical epic. Accordingly, after the third attack the grandmother is described as a heroic figure walking gefaßt im Flüchtlingszug, auf schwachen Beinen In eine Nachwelt ein. Da war kein Weinen Das auf den Trümmern noch verfing (NdS, 148) [calmly in the procession of refugees, on weak legs into posterity. There were no tears that could catch on these ruins.]

In “Europa nach dem letzten Regen” the gendered heroism and the dramatic reenactment of first-hand experiences remains confined to the sixth poem. However, the transgenerational exploration of the actual experience of the bombing indicates Grünbein’s break with the cold optics that had defined his early Dresden poetry. In the words of Helen Vendler, “Durs Grünbein’s account stands as an illumination and corrective to the more impersonal accounts of historians and scholars.”10 What is already audible in “Europa nach dem letzten Regen” becomes much more explicit in Porzellan, as this cycle adopts a strikingly elegiac tone. In an interview Grünbein explained that he could no longer sustain the youthful hardness of his early poetry.11 However, for Grünbein the elegiac is far more than a poetic response to the inevitable experience of advancing age. In the same interview he proposed that the dialogue with

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the dead is the very essence of all literature.12 In his essay “Mein babylonisches Gehirn” (My Babylonian brain) he further illuminates the anthropological function of poetry. For Grünbein it provides culture with a deep memory archive in which the voices of the past resonate.13 It is poetry’s prosodic character in particular that creates a vibrant connection between the poet’s individual voice and the manifold stories that have been communicated through the centuries. Poetry’s key device is to concentrate experiences into dense language, hard as pebbles, that will resonate beyond the immediate context: Erst die Emphase der Dichtung hat aus dem Gemurmel, dem lebensbegleitenden Singsang von Emotion und Erkenntnis etwas Erinnerbares herausgeholt und zu Kieseln gehärtet.14 [Only the concentrated emphasis of poetry has managed to extract something memorable from the murmur, the singsong of emotions and insights that accompanies our lives, and harden this into pebbles.]

Poetry is for Grünbein a mnemonic space that conserves fractured memories of the past in the same way that a rubbish dump can preserve discarded objects. In his essay “Vulkan und Gedicht” (Volcano and poem) he explores the potent connection between garbage and poetry by recounting how as a youth he rummaged with friends through the garbage dump near the garden city of Hellerau in the north of Dresden where he grew up.15 After the war the rubble of the destroyed city had been piled up there and layers of household garbage then covered it. An artificial Vesuvius, the dump had thus preserved the old Dresden underneath its layers (VG, 15). Broken church doors, balconies of bombed theaters, and torsos of blackened statues had created a Baroque Pompeii that aroused the imagination of later generations in analogy to the ancient city whose life had been extinguished by a natural catastrophe (VG, 17). By aligning the destruction of Dresden with the destruction of Pompeii Grünbein places the event in a European context that equips the Dresden narrative with mythological depth. While the comparison serves to highlight the poet’s archeological interests, it also fuels a transhistorical reading of the bombing of Dresden. Covered by decaying household waste, the garbage dump is the allegorical embodiment of the sublime forces of history that can strike at any moment to destroy human life.16 It is in line with Grünbein’s mythologizing reading that the dump is the site of the poet’s initiation into his task of unearthing the meaningful shards of human history (VG, 18). Grünbein ascribes an enormous cultural function to poetry. While it can and does attend to the present, for Grünbein it gains its deeper transhistorical function from a conception of time that undoes the tyranny of

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the present. As Amir Eshel has argued, Grünbein’s “at times seemingly obsessive occupation with death, decay, and oblivion can be seen as the poetic reflection of a historically fascinated memory machine.” Eshel rightly suggests that Grünbein’s poetry aims to capture “the material manifestations of a universal historical tectonics” in order to give “to rapidly flashing time, the shade of the absent, yet so present catastrophe, a visual form.”17

Generational Affiliation and Distance in Grünbein’s Porzellan The critical response to Porzellan was overwhelmingly scathing. For example, writing for Zeit, Katharina Döbler attacked Grünbein for an elegiac style that, although it was modeled on ancient tragedy, reminded her primarily of the recent wave of soppy TV dramas about the bombing of Dresden. Grünbein, according to Döbler, indulged in this collection in a moralizing tone that primarily demonstrates a patriarchal disposition. The author’s unfortunate “Herrenzimmermanier” (manner of the gentleman’s salon) brings his poetry dangerously close to the Biedermeier, the nineteenth-century period that in German cultural history stands for provincial and bourgeois conservatism and resistance to change.18 Jürgen Verdofsky, too, judged Grünbein’s Dresden cycle a dismal failure. In his view Porzellan foundered because it resembled an oversized memorial: the monumental style only cast a dispersed light on the past without illuminating anything.19 Grünbein’s cycle did not fare better with Thomas Steinfeld, who criticized Grünbein severely in the Süddeutsche Zeitung for having employed classical meter in order to aggrandize his subject. But instead of elevation, the result was for Steinfeld sentimental bathos and a series of pornographic effects that reflected the author’s worrying lack of intellectual and aesthetic distance from his subject matter.20 False immediacy and the garish intensity of often-crude metaphors in this collection have taken the place of critical reflection, he declared. The same sentiment was echoed by Michael Braun, who, writing for the influential Neue Zürcher Zeitung, also took issue with Grünbein’s alleged failure to find the right tone for the trauma of destruction. Braun contrasted the contrived solemnity of Porzellan with the more genuine and edgy roughness of Grauzone morgens.21 Evidently, reviewers touched on important literary and aesthetic principles, above all Grünbein’s choice of metaphors, the rhyme, and the broken trochaic meter, which in Porzellan appear to clunk along in amateurish fashion. Such aesthetic reservations aside, however, the critics’ prime objection was to Grünbein’s alleged lack of distance from his subject matter. The harshness of such judgments rests implicitly on a key feature of

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German memory politics: a deep-seated cultural distrust of emotions, which are seen to jeopardize a critical understanding of the past. This is in part a legacy of Descartian rationalism and its denunciation of all forms of non-cognitive engagement with the world. In the case of Germany, however, the premise that cognitive distance is the only door to historical understanding was arguably reinforced by the discursive culture of the 1960s. The student generation, born between the early and late 1940s and socialized during the 1950s, attacked the Adenauer era for the swift rehabilitation of former Nazis, the re-militarization of West Germany, and the policy of Western integration, all of which were deemed to have fostered Western imperialism. From the perspective of the 1968ers, as the participants in the protests at that time have come to be called, the foundation of the Federal Republic had been a false new start that barely covered up the underlying continuities with the Nazi period. Hence the eruption of an antagonistic conflict in the guise of the so-called Aufarbeitungsdiskurs (discourse of rational analysis) that pitted this self-styled revolutionary avant-garde against the parental generation, public representatives, and politicians. Inspired by the international protest against American imperialism and the Vietnam War, the radicalized factions of the student movement deployed a Marxist idiom to claim that postwar West Germany was a totalitarian variant of an underlying fascist structure that must be overturned by violent means. An offshoot of the movement, the Rote Armee Fraktion or RAF (Red Army Faction), turned revolutionary rhetoric into brutal practice. The year 1968 was surely a turning point in the history of West Germany. The intense confrontation between the students and an establishment that had been quite happy to bury the past prepared the ground for a more open and pluralistic society that came to full fruition when the Green party entered mainstream politics in the 1980s. However, besides accelerating institutional reforms, the German variant of the student movement fostered a discursive culture based on the principles of confrontation and accusation. In the following decades an extremely confrontational discursive practice became a signature of many public debates and memory contests.22 Dialogue and the acceptance of alternative experiences and opinions were frequently censured as illegitimate expressions of the false consciousness of a liberal bourgeoisie that was deemed only to safeguard its vested interest and a repressive status quo. In 2008, the fortieth anniversary of 1968, the question of the impact of the student revolution on West German political culture and on unified Germany surfaced once more.23 Forty years after what one 1968er ironically called “our little German cultural revolution,” former protagonists themselves began to question whether the student movement had really achieved the transformation of German society.24 What had presented itself as a series of enlightened debates about the Nazi past appeared in hind-

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sight as the symptomatic reenactment of the stigmatization of German cultural identity.25 Much of the rhetoric of 1968 with its infectious mix of Maoism, Marxism, anti-imperialism, and anti-Americanism now presented itself as a displacement strategy that had allowed the 1968ers to reject the inheritance of a collective stain. The blind spots of the agonistic controversies of the post-1960s era were exposed when later generations, often the children of the 1968ers, developed a pronounced interest in the personal experiences of the war generation. After unification private memories about the Third Reich, hidden emotions and feelings poured forth, generating a second German debate about victimhood. Demographic change played a big role here, since most of the real perpetrators were dead. The alliance between grandparents and grandchildren was also helped by the fact that the grandparents of the 1990s had been children or young adolescents during the Nazi era and thus not responsible for electing the Nazis to power.26 The first version of the German victim debate had occurred in the 1950s: at that time the idea that the overwhelming majority of Germans had been deceived by a small clique of Nazi leaders was a convenient alibi that, precisely because it served apologetic purposes, allowed legions of so-called Mitläufer (collaborators) and convinced Nazis to resume their lives. In contrast to the 1950s, the victim discourse of the late 1990s was embedded in an established framework of contrition. In the light of now undisputed acknowledgement of guilt and responsibility it was at last possible to also take stock of personal scars and losses that had engendered unmastered phantoms of the past in many families and in the collective unconscious. The upsurge of autobiographical and fictional family narratives in particular is symptomatic of a cultural rediscovery of emotions and feelings as transgenerational carriers of personal and collective memories.27 The premise that the past can be adequately worked through only by means of a distanced and analytical method that delegitimates emotions as irrational symptoms of denial was now disputed. And once the historical facts were established beyond dispute, personal emotions could be used to supplement rather than substitute for them. Postmodernism, with its emphasis on multiple points of view, undoubtedly also played a role here. It was now evident that one-sided rationalism not only ignored the basic fact of our bodily existence, but it also forgot that most forms of cultural expression, ranging from the greatest ancient tragedy to the most popular soap opera, arouse emotions as well as reflections. The main title of Grünbein’s epic cycle Porzellan evokes the fragile Meißner porcelain, famous for its beautiful glaze, as a key trope for the destruction of the city. Porcelain had been produced for the first time outside East Asia in Dresden in the eighteenth century under the reign of Augustus the Strong. The Königlich-Polnische und Kurfürstlich-Sächsische Porzellan-Manufaktur, founded in the early eighteenth century, became

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the leading manufacturing plant for refined porcelain in Europe. But the word “Porzellan” in Grünbein’s title also alludes to the German-Jewish poet Paul Celan as a latent reference point for the poetic cycle.28 Obviously Grünbein does not hermetically encrypt his poetry in the manner of Celan, but he makes Celan’s presence audible in the title in order to shadow German memory with Jewish memory. In this way, the cycle precludes the one-dimensional elegiac lamentation of German losses. The self in Grünbein’s cycle highlights his postmemorial position right from the start. The subtitle, Poem vom Untergang meiner Stadt, indicates with its possessive pronoun that the poetic self adopts the position of an insider, who, although he was born after the war, has inherited memories that allow him to reenact the city’s destruction in forty-nine epic poems. This is further underlined by the first poem, in which the poetic self is introduced as a “Spätgeborener” (one born late), who was not born until seventeen years after the destruction of the city, at a time when the city’s wounds had been superficially closed: Ein strenges Einheitsgrau Schloß die Wunden, und vom Zauber blieb — Verwaltung [Grayness, severe and uniform Has closed over the wounds, nothing left of the former magic but — planning.]

In response to the Communist planners’ mishandling of the restoration of Dresden’s architectural heritage, the poetic self is regularly overcome by an elegiac mood, which Grünbein ironically likens in the last verse to a recurring hiccup: “Elegie, das kehrt wie Schluckauf wieder” (elegy — that returns like hiccups). Throughout the cycle this combination of an ironic postmemorial tone with an elegiac register at once evokes and destabilizes the myth of Dresden. The postmemorial position is a key device that allows Grünbein to highlight both the transgenerational connection with the past and his distance from it. Returning in the tenth poem to the idea that he was born long after the war, the poet now designates his poetic persona as a “greenhorn” who has not witnessed the destruction of Dresden first-hand: Komm, beruhig dich, greenhorn, Nicht dabeigewesen Bist du, als die Herrlichkeit versank. Was Mutter sah Kaum fünf Jahre alt, wirst du nie in ihren Augen lesen. Weltkrieg, Trauma — nichts bewahrt die DNA. [Calm down, greenhorn You were not there when the splendor sank. What mother saw When she was barely five years old you will not read in her eyes. World War, trauma — none of this is stored in DNA.]

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This rejection of the idea of a traumatic legacy inherited by a process of a quasi-genetic encoding clearly underlines the poet’s criticism of an uncritical collective memory culture: he thus decides to erase what he has heard from early childhood. Renouncing a falsely inherited affiliation with the event, he reminds us instead of the historical agency that is elided from this memory: Lösch, was du von Kind an hörtest: “Arme Stadt” — Den Familienseufzer. Du der Unverwandte. Dresden, Dresden, weißt genau, wer es zerdeppert hat. Nicht der Tommy war es, Uncle Sam. Die eigne Bande Gab ihn auf, Geburtsort, für ein Linseneintopfmahl. [Blot out what you have heard since early childhood: “poor city” — The family’s collective sigh. You who are unrelated. Dresden, Dresden, you know quite well who smashed it. It was neither Tommy nor Uncle Sam, your own mob Gave up their birthplace for a mess of potage.]

Postmemorial liberation from membership of a particular memory culture is further elaborated in the forty-second poem, where the poet gives voice to the members of the generation with direct experience who, because they lived through the bombing, violently reject the poet’s postmemorial revisionism as an inauthentic verbal game: accordingly, the poet is called a “Schlitzohr” (a crook), then a clown and a mere historian who has no idea of the damage done by an incendiary bomb. As the poem progresses, the collective voice of the survivors who witnessed the bombing becomes ever more aggressive: Diese Brut, die Krieg nur aus den Kinosesseln kennt, Popcorn futternd dort im Dunkel, weit zurückgelehnt — Schatten, Schulstoff-Wiederkäuer, Nachkriegszombie. [These brats who only know the war from the comfort of a movie seat Munching popcorn in the darkness, settling back — Shadows, regurgitators of school lessons, postwar zombies.]

Staging the conflict between the experiential and postmemorial generations, Grünbein here foregrounds the question of authenticity: while the members of the experiential generation insist on the privileged vantage point of the eye-witness, the poet highlights the historical blind spots in their memoryscape. The air raids first appear in the third poem, where the poet imagines the first wave of attacks as a dramatic overturning of the seasons: Eben Frost noch, blau am Fahrradlenker klebt die Hand, Schon herrscht Wüstenwind, fegt übers Häusermeer.

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In den Wintermänteln, pharaonensteif, sind sie verbrannt. Heißer war kein Sommer je. [Just a moment ago frost, one’s hand frozen blue on the bike’s handlebar Now desert wind reigns, sweeping across the sea of houses In their winter coats they burned, stiff like pharaohs No summer was ever hotter.]

While the juxtaposition of “Frost” and “Wüstenwind” connotes a cataclysmic catastrophe, the image of the “pharaonensteif” bodies, which have been mummified by the firestorm, points to the longevity of this event in cultural memory. What appears as a poetic invocation of the apocalyptic narrative is challenged in the fourth poem, which gives the cycle its title. Here the poet reintroduces the notion of human agency that was eclipsed in collective memory. The opening lines of the fourth poem employ the image of the smashed Meißen figurines and vases as a metaphor for Dresden’s destroyed cultural heritage. However, the semantic reference point of this image is flipped over in the following verses where the smashed porcelain becomes the central metaphor for the Pogrom Night on the 9 November 1938, which entered collective memory under the misnomer of “Kristallnacht” (literally, “Crystal Night,” Night of the Broken Glass): Porzellan, viel Porzellan hat man zerschlagen hier, Püppchen, Vasen und Geschirr aus weißem Meißner Gold Doch nicht nur dies. Ach, es war einmal — ein Klirren, Und als Donner kam es auf den Tatort zugerollt. Nein kein Polterabend war, was Volkes spitze Zungen Die Kristallnacht nannten, jener Glückstag für die Glaser. Bis zum Aschermittwoch später war da nur ein Sprung. [Porcelain, a lot of porcelain was smashed to pieces here Little dolls, vases, and crockery made of white Meißen gold But not just that. Ah, once upon a time — a jangling sound And thunder roared toward this crime scene No, it was not a Polterabend, what the people maliciously called The Crystal Night, this lucky day for glaziers Just a hop, skip, and jump away from Ash Wednesday.]

The jollity of a “Polterabend,” the evening before a wedding when friends smash old china, is gruesomely evocative of a barbarous mob bent on destruction. By juxtaposing the collective memory of the city’s bygone golden era, evoked in the third verse through the citation of the sentimental “Ach, es war einmal,” with the sound of the broken glass of Jewish shop windows in the same line, Grünbein deconstructs the notion of cultural innocence that is at the heart of the myth of Dresden. Historical consciousness finds further expression in the following lines: although the

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image of thunder roaring toward the city at first reinforces the idea of the city’s destruction as an apocalyptic event, the designation “Tatort” or crime scene overturns this suprahistorical reading and the myth of the city’s historical innocence. The image of the “Sprung” in the last line, which evokes both a crack in the porcelain and the carnival season with its “Narrensprung,”29 not only reminds the reader of the timing of the bombing on Shrove Tuesday, but, more important, it creates a causal link between the events of the Pogrom Night, and the later destruction of the city. The image of porcelain runs through the cycle as whole: by associating one of Dresden’s great icons — Meißen porcelain — with Nazi perpetration, Grünbein disturbs the nostalgic view of Dresden as a city of a universal culture that was at a remove from National Socialism. The seventeenth poem introduces the well-known monogram of Meißen porcelain, the symbol of the crossed swords. As a stamp of an unsurpassed quality and authenticity it is admired by the Dresden families who are shown to turn over their heirlooms to study the signet: Venus, stellt euch vor, so weit ins Nebelland verirrt Sucht ein Plätzchen, wo sie Ruhe hat auf ihrer Flucht Durch Europa, und verwandelt sich in Porzellangeschirr. Die gekreuzten Schwerter sind, man kennt es, ihr Signet. Teures Erbstück, die Familie präsentiert es dem Besuch. Teller, Tassen, alles wird hier um- und umgedreht. [Venus, just imagine, strayed so far into this foggy land Searching for a place where she might rest on her flight Through Europe, and turns into porcelain crockery. The crossed swords, so familiar, are her signet. Precious heirloom, the family gets it out for the visitors. Plates and cups — everything is turned over and over again.]

The theme of porcelain is picked up once more in poem 28: here the poet turns to the discovery and manufacturing process as developed by Johann Friedrich Böttger in the early eighteenth century. The poem not only alludes to Böttger’s imprisonment by Augustus the Strong, who wanted him to find a method for making gold, but it projects images of National Socialist violence onto this cultural history. The opening line — “Porzellan, schau an, so früh schon war das Kind gebrannt” (porcelain, just look how soon the child was burned) — is an allusion to the saying “gebranntes Kind scheut Feuer” (the burned child fears the fire, or once bitten twice shy). And so a proverb about learning through bad experiences is turned into a historical pointer to the victims of the Holocaust and the bombing of Dresden. That this daring juxtaposition does not neutralize historical judgment is made apparent in poem 45, where the poet returns once more

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to the image of the fragile and delicate porcelain. The opening lines invoke Dresden in the gendered figure of a slightly frivolous and chatty Galatea, the white statue carved by Pygmalion and brought to life by Aphrodite. In the closing lines she is shown to fall silent when witnessing the violent destruction of the city: bist vor Schreck verstummt Als die Muscheln platzten und die Schnecken und Delphine Berstend in die Tiefe sanken, die kein Wort erreicht Wer versteckt schon Munition in Porzellan-Terrinen? [You fell silent out of shock When the shells burst and the snails and dolphins shattered Disappearing in a void that no words can reach Who would hide ammunition in porcelain tureens?]

Here Grünbein confronts the myth that the bombing of Dresden was a wanton act of destruction without any military interest: the image of the ammunition hidden in the tureen alludes to the conversion of many of Dresden’s factories into industries servicing the war, such as J. C. Müller Universell Werke, which had switched production from cigarette making to producing shells for the Wehrmacht and aircraft parts for Spanish nationalists.30 Images of German perpetration run through the cycle as a whole: for example, they reappear in the twenty-fifth poem, where the reader is reminded of the destruction of the Warsaw ghetto: “Denk an Warschau. Eine Stadt aus Rache plattgemacht” (think of Warsaw, a city flattened in revenge) and in verse 8: “Heim ins Reich die Flucht. Doch erst das Ghetto ausradiert” (back to the Reich in flight. But the ghetto erased first). The italicized words echo the Nazi language of perpetration that has been documented by Victor Klemperer, for whom the destruction of Dresden coincided with his survival as a Jew since Klemperer was supposed to be deported along with the remaining Jews in Dresden a day after the bombing. The citation of Klemperer is made explicit in the twenty-sixth poem, where the poet refers to Klemperer’s book LTI, Lingua Tertii Imperii, which traces the linguistic imprints of National Socialist violence in a specific Nazi vocabulary and tonality: “LTI . . . wie man hineinbrüllt schallt es aus dem Wald” (LTI — as you sow, so you shall reap). However, Grünbein’s cycle does not simply refute the myth of Dresden by way of a historical metaphoric language that superimposes acts of Nazi perpetration onto the memory of the destruction of the city. The cycle as a whole is characterized by the dialectical movement between invoking and erasing the myth of Dresden. Although the poet keeps pointing to the historical causality of the destruction, he regularly returns to the collective memory of the event. This is perhaps most evident in the

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fifteenth poem, which was written after the completion of the Frauenkirche. The rebuilding of the church was designed to be an architectural icon of redemption that would house what one might call a community of reconciliation. In response, the poem captures first a sense of memory as a pendulum that eternally swings from past to present and back again: Damals heute . . . Unablässig schwingt sie hin und her, Die Erinnerung ein Pendel [then and now constantly swinging to and fro memory is a pendulum.]

However, in the following lines the poet’s imagination does not home in on the rebuilt church as one might expect but turns rather to its collapse on Ash Wednesday, a tragic caesura that has been passed down to the poetic self through a cultural memory that is gendered as feminine: Frauenkirche: wahrlich Frau war sie. Gab ihren Lieben Etwas Zeit noch sich zu sammeln. Schwerverletzt, Lange ist sie so, gebrochnen Rückgrats, stehngeblieben Vorher, nachher . . . Die Zäsur ihr Sturz. In all den Jahren Die Lektion war: so wie sie die Haltung wahren. [Frauenkirche: Truly womanly she was. She gave her loved ones Time to pick themselves up. Badly injured, With a broken spine, she remained standing for a long time Before and after — her downfall a caesura. In all those years The lesson was: hold your posture just like her.]

The anthropomorphized image of the church as a badly injured woman who tries to keep standing in spite of her broken spine invests the myth of Dresden with new impact. Here Grünbein’s imagery evokes traditional associations of a maternal protectiveness and a dignity in the face of death that reinstates the myth of Dresden as an innocent city that was full of refugees, women, and children. The gendered pathos of this poem stands out in the cycle as a whole. Although it is framed by a decidedly historical consciousness, it nevertheless stages a sense of endurance, heroism, and dignity as essential virtues of the city and its inhabitants. This poem is an act of reflective partisanship. It recognizes that, as a descendant, the poet must acknowledge his grandmother’s and mother’s trauma, while also admitting his own distance. Elsewhere Grünbein points to the gendered nature of the trauma through images of concrete objects, such as the mother’s doll, which was burned along with her entire “Kinderstube” (P, 40; nursery). Such childhood

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objects function as authentic symbols of a traumatic loss that engenders the transgenerational obligation to remember. Furthermore, by underlining the lasting iconicity of certain images of destruction, the poetic cycle keeps the collective memory alive. This is particularly evident in the sixteenth poem, where Grünbein evokes the image of the statue of Luther in front of the destroyed Frauenkirche: Dieses Bild bleibt unvergeßlich: wie dort Luther stand. Ringsum Brachland, scheues Grün, und unterm schnöden Himmel, ein Memento für den fast vergeßnen Brand, Hielt ein Fensterbogen Wacht in der urbanen Öde. [This image remains unforgettable: Luther standing there Surrounded by a wasteland, tender green, and under the disdainful Sky a memento of the almost-forgotten fire: An arched window keeps watch in this urban wilderness.]

As former GDR citizens would remember well, the statue of Luther had been toppled during the bombing; it was not put back on its pedestal until 1955. One of the iconic images of destroyed Dresden shows the ruined church with Luther lying on his back.31

The Transformation of German Cultural Memory Grünbein engages with the symbolic value of Dresden as a chosen trauma in German collective and cultural memory since unification. In the collective imaginary the rebuilding of the Frauenkirche signaled much more than the simple restoration of an architectural heritage: it heralded a new conciliatory memory culture, replacing the anti-redemptory Adornian paradigm that been promoted by the generation of 1968 throughout the 1970s and 1980s. Against the backdrop of unification, it now appeared entirely plausible to enact a radical paradigm shift that moved away from the earlier antagonistic discourse that accompanied so many German memory debates well into the 1990s. Dresden became the stage for a collective performance of a dramaturgy of remembrance that aims to reconcile the memory of a traumatic past with the celebration of a new beginning. This is precisely the context of Grünbein’s poetic cycle, which foregrounds the poet’s postmemorial position to chart the self’s connection with a past that has been transmitted indirectly to him primarily by the female figures in his family. Grünbein engages in deliberate acts of gendered partisanship: he conveys trangenerational solidarity with the female members of his family who lived through the horrors of the bombing. Gender therefore emerges as a powerful transmitter of cultural memory.

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But the cycle also communicates a liberating belatedness that allows him to reject a false sense of affiliation with a national trauma. Grünbein’s reading of the city overturns the one-dimensional lamentation of the German trauma that, for example, found paradigmatic expression in the rubble photography of the postwar period. However, while he employs historical metaphors that superimpose images of the Holocaust onto this memory space, Grünbein is careful to maintain a balance between the erasure and evocation of the myth of Dresden. My interpretation of Grünbein’s poetry also underscores the function of literature as a critical vehicle particularly suited to the transformation of such legacies. According to psychoanalysis it is the subconscious nature of the deposited images that keeps a chosen trauma alive.32 From a literaryhistorical perspective, literature plays a decisive role in lifting the unconscious onto a level of self-reflexive articulation that is open at once to emotional identification and to critical contestation. Unlike historical discourse which, for good reasons, attempts to objectify history, literature can take care of affective experiences, without, however, precluding historical reflection. Literature is necessarily dialogic and as such discursive. While Grünbein’s early collection Grauzone morgens gives expression to a stagnant Socialism deprived of all hope and urban vitality, the later poems in “Europa nach dem letzten Regen” and in Porzellan explore poetry’s contribution to cultural memory. Here the emphasis is on the myth of Dresden and the idea of a transgenerational legacy that binds later generations to a moment of traumatic rupture. The poems in Porzellan therefore not only transport the chosen trauma to the next generation as an obligation to remember, but they also investigate what is eclipsed in the collective imagination. The redeployment of a whole set of existing images, such as the idea of Dresden as Florence on the Elbe or the manifold references to porcelain, a rarefied and fragile product, solidifies the cultural memory of Dresden as an innocent seat of the arts and culture. Because literature is intrinsically self-reflexive, it can simultaneously display and challenge the various cultural, political, and ideological frames through which cultural meaning is generated. But for Grünbein it is the great privilege of poetry to harden into memorable pebbles what he calls “the singsong of emotions and insights” that accompanies our lives.33

Notes 1

For a detailed chronology see Claus Fischer, Hans-Joachim Jäger, and Manfred Kobuch, “Chronologischer Abriß zur Geschichte des Wiederaufbaus der Frauenkirche, 1945–2005,” in Der Wiederaufbau der Dresdner Frauenkirche: Botschaft und Ausstrahlung einer weltweiten Bürgerinitiative, ed. Ludwig Güttler (Regensburg: Schnell & Steiner, 2006), 321–50.

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Durs Grünbein, Grauzone morgens: Gedichte (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1988).Further references to this work are given in the text using the abbreviation Gm. 3 In his lecture on poetics Grünbein states: “das waren . . . Tagelieder aus einer sich in Alltagsgrau hüllenden sozialistischen Lebenswelt, nur daß ihr Sänger nicht als erinnerungsseliger Troubadour umherging, sondern als verdeckter Beobachter, der aus der Jackentasche heraus seine Photos schoß. Das waren fast allesamt ziemlich verwackelte Schwarzweißaufnahmen.” (They were morning songs from a socialist reality covered in an everyday grayness; the only difference being that their singer did not walk about as a nostalgic troubadour but as an undercover observer, taking shots from his jacket pocket. Nearly all of them were rather blurred blackand-white photos). See Durs Grünbein, Vom Stellenwert der Worte: Frankfurter Poetikvorlesung 2009 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2010), 24. 4 “Gespräch mit Durs Grünbein,” in Die wüste Stadt: Sieben Dichter über Dresden, ed. Renatus Deckert (Frankfurt am Main: Insel, 2005), 203. 5 Grünbein, “Gedicht über Dresden,” in Schädelbasislektion: Gedichte (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1991), 112. 6 For Speer the “ruin value” captured the future appearance of Nazi buildings which should appear as noble as the ancient Roman ruins. On Speer’s and Hitler’s plans for Berlin see Brian Ladd, The Ghosts of Berlin: Confronting German History in the Urban Landscape (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1997), 127–41. 7 Rolf Goebel, “Gesamtkunstwerk Dresden: Official Urban Discourse and Durs Grünbein’s Poetic Critique,” German Quarterly 80, no. 4 (2007): 503. 8 Grünbein, Nach den Satiren: Gedichte (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1999). Further references to this work are given in the text using the abbreviation NdS. The title refers to a painting by Max Ernst, who painted a surrealist post-apocalyptic landscape of destruction in the early 1940s entitled “Europe after the Rain II.” 9 On the formal aspects of Grünbein’s poems see Helen Vendler, “Oblivion City: A Review of Durs Grünbein, Ashes for Breakfast: Selected Poems,” New Republic (Nov. 2008): 44–47. For an online version see http://www.powells.com/ blog/?p=4035. 10 Vendler, “Oblivion City,” 47. 11 “Gespräch mit Durs Grünbein,” 209. 12 “Gespräch mit Durs Grünbein,” 193. 13 Durs Grünbein, “Mein babylonisches Gehirn,” in Gedicht und Geheimnis: Aufsätze, 1990–2006 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2007), 22. 14 Grünbein, “Mein babylonisches Gehirn,” 23. 15 Grünbein, “Vulkan und Gedicht,” in Gedicht und Geheimnis, 13–18. Further references to this work are given in the text using the abbreviation VG. 16 On waste imagery in contemporary German literature see Gillian Pye, “Trash and Transformation: The Search for Identity in Wolfgang Hilbig’s Die Kunde von den Bäumen and Alte Abdeckerei,” in “Transformations of German Cultural

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Identity since 1989,” ed. Anne Fuchs and Kathleen James-Chakraborty, special issue, New German Critique (forthcoming, 2011). 17 Amir Eshel, “Diverging Memories? Durs Grünbein’s Mnemonic Topographies and the Future of the German Past,” German Quarterly 74, no. 4. (2001): 410. 18 Katharina Döbler, “Forchtbar klassisch,” Die Zeit, 26 Jan. 2006. 19 Jürgen Verdofsky, “Trauer mit Goldrand,” Frankfurter Rundschau, 19 Oct. 2005. 20 Thomas Steinfeld, “Bomben, blankpoliert,” Süddeutsche Zeitung, 6 Oct. 2005. 21 Michael Braun, “Gibt es eine Sprache für das Inferno? Ein Poem auf Dresdens Untergang von Durs Günbein,” Neue Zürcher Zeitung, 22 Sept. 2005. The negative evaluation of the main broadsheets was echoed in the Frankfurter Rundschau. See Jürgen Verdorsky, “Trauer mit Goldrand,” Frankfurter Rundschau, 18 Oct. 2005. Only the FAZ offered a positive review, refuting the accusation that this cycle was drenched in indefensible sentimentalism. For Friedmar Appel, the poetic self in this cycle adopts changing voices throughout, including that of the flaneur, the archaeologist and historian. See Friedmar Appel, “Ja, es tut noch weh: Poetisches Gedächtnis; Durs Grünbeins Dresdner Elegien,” FAZ, 18 Feb. 2006. 22 On the idea of memory contests see Anne Fuchs and Mary Cosgrove, “Introduction: Germany’s Memory Contests and the Management of the Past,” in German Memory Contests: The Quest for Identity in Literature, Film and Discourse since 1990, ed. Anne Fuchs, Mary Cosgrove, and Georg Grote, 2nd ed. (2006; repr., Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2010), 1–21. 23 See for example Wolfgang Kraushaar, Achtundsechzig: Eine Bilanz (Berlin: Propyläen, 2008); Götz Aly, Unser Kampf: 1968 — Ein irritierter Blick zurück (Bonn: Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung, 2008); Peter Schneider, Rebellion und Wahn: Mein 68 (Bonn: Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung, 2008). See also Florian Seidl, Die APO und der Konflikt mit der Vätergeneration: NS Vergangenheit im Diskurs der “68er” (Nürnberg: Seidl, 2006); Lothar Baier, Wilfried Gottschalch, Reimut Reiche, Thomas Schmid, Joscha Schmierer, Adriano Sofri, eds., Die Früchte der Revolte: Über die Veränderung der politischen Kultur durch die Studentenbewegung (Berlin: Wagenbach, 1988); Ingo Cornils, “Successful Failure? The Impact of the German Student Movement on the Federal Republic of Germany,” in Recasting German Identity: Culture, Politics and Literature in the Berlin Republic, ed. Stuart Taberner and Frank Finlay (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2002), 109–26. 24 Gerd Koenen, Das rote Jahrzehnt: Unsere kleine deutsche Kulturrevolution 1967–1977, 4th ed. (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 2002). 25 On stigma as a marker of social or moral inferiority see Erving Goffmann, Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity (London: Penguin, 1990). On the intellectual response to stigmatization see Dirk Moses, German Intellectuals and the Nazi Past (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2007). 26 See Lothar Kettenacker, ed., Ein Volk von Opfern? Die neue Debatte um den Bombenkrieg, 1940–1945 (Berlin: Rowohlt, 2003); Helmut Schmitz, A Nation of Victims? Representation of German Wartime Suffering from 1945 to the Present

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(Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2007); Bill Niven, ed., Germans as Victims. Remembering the Past in Contemporary Germany (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave, 2006); Stuart Taberner and Karina Berger, eds., Germans as Victims in the Literary Fiction of the Berlin Republic (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2009). 27 On the transgenerational discourse in the new German family novel see Anne Fuchs, Phantoms of War in Contemporary German Literature, Films and Discourse: The Politics of Memory, 2nd ed. (2008; repr., Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave, 2010). 28 Durs Grünbein, Porzellan: Poem vom Untergang meiner Stadt (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2005). All quotations refer to this edition and to the numbered poems, as the volume has no page numbers. 29 “Narrensprung” is the name for a particular type of dance jump practiced in Rottweil during the great carnival parade, the culmination of the “alemannische Fasnet.” 30 On the conversion of Dresden’s industry for war production see Frederick Taylor, Dresden: Tuesday 13 February 1945 (London: Bloomsbury, 2004), 148– 65. 31 Richard Peter, Eine Kamera klagt an (Dresden: Dresdener Verlagsgesellschaft, 1949), 54. 32 On the creation of transgenerational obligations in traumatized societies see Vamik D. Volkan, Gabriele Ast, and William F. Greer, The Third Reich in the Unconscious: Transgenerational Transition and Its Consequences (London: BrunnerRoutledge, 2002); Volkan, “Traumatized Societies,” in Violence or Dialogue? Psychoanalytic Insights on Terror and Terrorism, ed. Sverre Varvin and Vamik D. Volkan (London: IPA Publications, 2003), 217–37. 33 Grünbein, “Mein babylonisches Gehirn,” 23.

12: History from a Bird’s Eye View: Reimagining the Past in Marcel Beyer’s Kaltenburg Aleida Assmann

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S TIME PASSES and the temporal distance between ourselves and the traumatic events of the Second World War grows, the quality of embodied memory that we associate with the status of the witness and with the genre of testimony is giving way to encoded representations of the past.1 Our image of the past is less and less influenced by contact with survivors and members of the war generation and more and more by mediations and remediations of past events. This new media milieu of representations that has been formed over the last two decades has had a profound effect on the way we imagine the past. We are surrounded by rapidly growing prosthetic memory consisting of a mass of archival information and a number of iconic images that form a common repertoire of symbolic references in cultural memory and public communication. At this point, literary reimaginings of recent German history not only interact with this extended historical archive of texts and images but also intervene in the public imaginary and engage with the patterns and stereotypes that have become fixed references in the collective memory of postwar generations. With the increasing distance from the historic events of the Second World War and the Holocaust, the role of the witness in literary texts has also changed. Marcel Beyer’s novel Kaltenburg (2008) is a case in point.2 Beyer’s protagonist, a seventy-one-year-old man whose life spans two German dictatorships, is a susceptive yet passive mediator figure who refracts the different historical environments of the Nazi period, the war, the GDR and post-unification Germany without much reflection or critical engagement. He does not form his own projects. Instead he becomes the product of an overpowering mentor whose scientific life project he shares. In order to write about the sixty-five year period when German history underwent the most dramatic changes in its history, Beyer chooses a traumatized child witness who also becomes a secondary witness through his close affiliation with his mentor and father-figure, Kaltenburg. Through his protagonists he creates a rather subdued and indirect perspective on the

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transformations of German history, one that reshuffles established hierarchies in the collective memory and challenges the received categories of victim and perpetrator without leveling them. Beyer’s first-person-narrator, Hermann Funk, is orphaned the night of 13–14 February 1945, as both of his parents fall prey to the flames. As a child survivor of the Second World War he is a traumatized narrator who is later adopted by his “second father,” the zoologist Ludwig Kaltenburg, who trains him to become his “living memory.” While Funk’s autobiographical memories are confused, incoherent, and incomplete, his semantic memory of individual birds, their properties, habits, and names is impeccable. In creating a protagonist with a layered memory, Beyer obstructs access to some of its layers, admitting only partial and incomplete glimpses of the past and forcing the reader to follow the circuitous process of working through the protagonist’s memories. In doing so, Beyer respects the generic rules of memory fiction, the task of which is not to provide basic historical knowledge but rather to show how Germans live with the unfinished business of the past, how it has driven, affected, and deformed individual lives, and how it has been repressed or has remained unacknowledged. Prominent literary examples in this regard include Uwe Timm’s Am Beispiel meines Bruders (Following my brother’s example; English title, In My Brother’s Shadow, 2003), Dagmar Leupold’s Nach den Kriegen (After the wars, 2004), Reinhard Jirgl’s Die Unvollendeten (The incomplete, 2003), Friedrich Christian Delius’s Mein Jahr als Mörder (My year as an assassin, 2004), or Angelika Overath’s Nahe Tage (Close days, 2005), all of which were published after the year 2000.3

Fusing Fact and Fiction Current German memory fiction draws on historical archives, poetic imagination, and autobiographical experience. Beyer, himself a resident of Dresden, brackets off his autobiographical background, but he does not dispense with his experience.4 In all his novels, literary imagination goes hand in hand with an ethos of extended research and heightened interest in accurate detail. While the doors of experience and witnessing are closed to him, as he was born in 1965, the archives are open and yield new information with which he reshuffles our stereotyped images of the National Socialist past. For Beyer, archival documents and historical information are not only the raw material for his literary fiction but also a vast field of specialized knowledge. In his books, imagination and research go hand in hand. His aim in this book, as he told his interviewers, was not to tell a compelling story but to discover something new.5 What he has discovered is a new language in which to write about the last seven decades of German history.

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In order to describe Beyer’s unique configuration of factual and fictional elements in the creation of his characters, we may refer to an aphorism by Nietzsche: “Der Dichter muss ein Ding erst genau sehn und es nachher wieder ungenau sehen: es absichtlich verschleiern”6 (The poet must first see a thing exactly as it is and then again in a blurred way: he has to veil it deliberately). Beyer’s first-person narrator is placed in a relationship with three fictional characters who are modeled on historical persons: Ludwig Kaltenburg, alias Konrad Lorenz, the famous zoologist (1903– 89), Martin Spengler, alias Joseph Beuys, the celebrated artist (1921–86), and Knut Sieverding, alias Heinz Sielmann, the pioneer filmmaker of animal life (1917–2006). Each of these male characters is introduced into the novel with his specific aura and area of expertise. They are brought into a fictional relationship with each other thanks to verifiable historical evidence that all three spent some time in Posen (Poznan) during the Second World War, when this Polish territory was occupied by Nazi Germany.7 The historical Beuys and Sielmann both attended the Luftwaffenschule in Posen. In Beyer’s novel they are linked with Ludwig Kaltenburg, whom he equips with the features of Konrad Lorenz, adding a dark secret. This relates to Kaltenburg’s work in a military hospital in Posen in 1942–43, where he was engaged in medical experiments, an episode that he later erased from his biography. While the name of the city of Posen remains forever connected in our iconic collective memory with Himmler’s infamous Posen speech of 6 October 1943, in which he explained the extermination of the Jewish people to the SS, Beyer’s novel challenges this automatic association by choosing this city as the hometown of his main protagonist. In the early 1940s Posen is a city in Poland where not a word of Polish is to be heard. All the street signs are in German and the NS Gauleiter resides in the castle on the hill. The narrator lives here, in this territory that has been occupied by the Germans at war, in a sheltered bourgeois home in the circle of a dissident family. His father is an empathetic and ethically principled botanist at the Reichsuniversität Posen. This sheltered life is disrupted by the arrival of the main character, Ludwig Kaltenburg, a zoologist; as it turns out, he is an adversary of Hermann’s father and represents a menacing element. The dissent between the two professors arises over principles of Nazi ideology. Kaltenburg is introduced as their spokesman, which resonates with the historical Lorenz, who was a staunch advocate of Nazi ideology.8 But again, the book does not exploit the obvious connection by making this trait a marked element of the character. Kaltenburg is also shown as a victim of Stalin, haunted by fears and obsessions (K, 197). The author takes great liberties in rewriting Konrad Lorenz as a fictional character. The opening scene of the book takes us to Altenburg, a little town near Vienna shortly before Kaltenburg’s death. In this opening scene the scientist is presented emblematically through his relationship to

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birds and to the book that was considered his lifetime achievement.This book replaces Lorenz’s well known bestseller was Das sogennante Böse: Zur Naturgeschichte der Aggression (So-called evil: on the natural history of aggression) published in 1963;9 with Urformen der Angst (Basic forms of angst), supposedly published in a year later, in 1964.10 Beyer, who stated in an interview that it is through these little shifts that he brings the fictional character to life,11 not only changes the focus of Kaltenburg’s research from aggression to fear but also relocates him to Dresden and replaces his emblematic bird, the gray goose, with jackdaws. Such transformations allow Beyer to illuminate the darker undercurrents of his life, relating to his experiences as a Russian prisoner of war. Beyer reveals fear as the flip side of aggression, describing emotions connected with war obliquely through the veil of zoological theories.

The Atmosphere of Death Like many memory novels, Beyer’s text shifts between various time levels, covering Hermann’s childhood in Posen (1942–44), two days in Dresden in 1945 that culminate in the bombing, his years with Ludwig Kaltenburg in Dresden (1951–61), and the interview that takes place much later in Kaltenburg’s former institute in Dresden (2005). In the very first pages of his novel Beyer creates a triangle between Kaltenburg, who is introduced shortly before his death in 1989, the bombing of Dresden in 1945, and the narrator, who outs himself as a traumatized witness of this event. The term “Todesatmosphäre” (atmosphere of death) appears only later in the book (K, 156); it is coined by Kaltenburg and applied to young Hermann. When entering the boy’s home, Kaltenburg notices a stifling “atmosphere of death,” which Hermann’s father has created by looking after weak and sick birds. In contrast to Hermann’s empathetic father, Kaltenburg airs a fascist philosophy of youth and health. He fears that the atmosphere of death casts a shadow on the young boy and that it has an emasculating effect. Kaltenburg reproaches Hermann’s father and tries to protect the boy from this negative ambience, which he fears might undermine the child’s vitality. The narrator grows up as a son of two fathers. A decade after his biological father dies in the bombing of Dresden, Kaltenburg becomes the teacher and mentor with whom he lives and works in his Dresden institute. The atmosphere of death from which Kaltenburg tries to protect him fully hits Hermann with the Dresden trauma and the death of his parents. The narrator is a mediating figure, a pale character whose colorlessness contrasts sharply with the weight and charisma of the great professor. Accordingly, he is described as “Ein nicht übermäßig begabter Student im vollen Hörsaal, dessen Namen man sich bei der Prüfung noch einmal

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buchstabieren läßt” (K, 66; A student in a full lecture hall who is not overly talented, whom one has to ask how to spell his name when he takes his exam). Funk lacks vitality, a sense of self and strong desires; he is largely defined by others. The traumatized witness of the bombing of Dresden is later transformed into the bearer of Kaltenburg’s memory. Like Jacques Austerlitz in Sebald’s eponymous novel, Hermann Funk compensates for his childhood trauma with an obsession to collect and preserve. While Sebald’s Austerlitz takes photos and studies architectural history,12 Funk, as an animal preparator, classifies, dissects, and “mummifies” birds. Both are melancholics in the Benjaminian sense, living in the aftermath of devastating events and engaged in collecting.13 By teaching Hermann the art of taxidermy, Kaltenburg inscribes himself and his work into his protégé’s memory: “Dann kannst Du Dich immer an mich erinnern!” (K, 192; Then you will always remember me!). Here Beyer creates an interesting link between trauma, paralysis, and conservation. After the impact event of the bombing of Dresden,14 and after he has felt the panic of a chaotic world in which life has been instantaneously transformed into death and he was hit and persecuted by burnt birds that were dropping from the sky, he becomes the custodian of a museum of natural history that consists of countless drawers of skillfully stuffed birds (see 99–100, 107). As a taxidermist and scrupulous custodian of these birds, the narrator’s bleached traumatic memory is overwritten with archival information concerning the names, customs, and stories of birds. Hermann is a liminal figure, perhaps even a kind of Hermes, who mediates between the living and the dead, the firsthand witnesses and the succeeding generations. Beyer also pays homage to Vladimir Nabokov, the researcher and collector of butterflies, from whose autobiography Speak Memory he takes the motto for his own book: “Ach, bloß ein kleiner Vogel — der hat keinen besonderen Namen” (Ah, merely a small bird — it doesn’t have a remarkable name). The narrator himself is such an unremarkable “small bird” who becomes a virtuoso memorist of individual birds. Beyer artfully introduces the preservation of dead animals as a new topos into the repertoire of memory metaphors. When we consider its affinity to Egyptian mummification, the art of taxidermy is more than a tool for scientific knowledge: it is also a cultural strategy for coping with trauma and death. But Kaltenburg, the father-figure and mentor, also carries the stamp of death. In the novel, he confesses at one point: “Wenn man meinen Eltern Glauben schenken will, dann habe ich als Tumor begonnen” (K, 221; If we may believe my parents, then I started as a tumor). Norbert Bischoff’s biography of Lorenz helps to illuminate this strange allusion, in which we learn that when his forty-year old mother was pregnant with him, the pregnancy was mistaken for abnormal growth. When it became apparent that it was an embryo, his father Adolf Lorenz set down the following instruction:

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Man sorge für das neugeborene Kind in gleicher Weise wie für jedes andere normale Kind; kein Brutofen, keine sonstigen, außerordentlichen Maßregeln! Das Neugeborene muß imstande sein, das extrauterine Leben zu ertragen, oder es stirbt besser. Ohne ein gewisses Maß von Lebenskraft sollen vorzeitig geborene Kinder das Leben lieber nicht versuchen wollen.15 [One should take care of the new born child the same way as one would of any other normal child; no incubator, no other extraordinary measures! The new born child must be able to bear extra-uterine life, or it would be better for it to die. Premature children should not have a stab at life without a certain measure of strength.]

Evidently, Kaltenburg’s passing reference to the tumor suggests that, from its very beginning, his life had been shrouded in an atmosphere of death. In Lorenz’s case it was his father who articulated the vitalist philosophy of health and strength. In Beyer’s novel, Kaltenburg applies similar principles to Hermann’s upbringing.

The Art of Attention, or: To Live is to Observe In one of his lectures Kaltenburg asks a question that lies at the heart of the novel. He wants to know “ob die alle Glieder lähmende Todesnähe dem Menschen wie dem Tier einen besonders klaren Blick verleiht” (K, 15; whether the all-paralyzing proximity of death lends both humans and animals a particularly clarity of perception). A continuous theme throughout the novel is attention and its diverse modes.16 It is striking that each of the protagonists is the bearer of a specific gaze, introducing different modes of attention, some of which are clearer, some more clouded, some focused, and some more oblique. As the child survivor and witness of the trauma of Dresden, Hermann Funk is the bearer of a catastrophic gaze. As he grows up, he is characterized by a narrow and highly selective scope of attention. Having experienced an overdose of shock and horror, he develops into a patient observer of birds, both in their living contexts and in the drawers of the natural museum. While Funk is associated with the efforts of forgetting and remembering, Kaltenburg is the master of observation, associated with “Geistesgegenwart” (K, 9; an unwavering presence of mind). Where Funk is oriented toward the past, his mentor’s attention is related exclusively to the present. In his profession, life, and personality the ornithologist mobilizes heightened attention and techniques of controlled observation. His sharp and focused eye is repeatedly compared to that of a bird of prey: “ein Falke auf dem Ansitz” (K, 71; a hawk on a perch). While Kaltenburg’s

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(cold) attention operates in a scientific framework of curiosity and is a tool in the production of knowledge, the attention of Klara Hagemann (Funk’s lover and spouse) operates like that of Hermann’s father: in a social framework that is related to caring empathy and moral consciousness. A key sentence that is frequently repeated throughout the novel is: “Leben ist beobachten” (K, 128; 306; 324; 336; 340; life is observing). Not only is attention the theme of the novel, but the novel is itself an exercise in attention, demanding from readers a great flexibility in shifting their attention from the foreground to the background, constantly aligning the known with the unknown. In Beyer’s novel, no observation is unidirectional. Every observer is also being observed, be it by another person or another species. It turns out, for instance, that during his imprisonment Kaltenburg, the mastermind of scientific observation, had lived for years under the observing and all-controlling gaze of Stalin. In the course of his interview the narrator tells the interviewer that he is fascinated with the white eyes of the jackdaw: Jedesmal, wenn ich eine Dohle sehe, faszinieren mich von neuem ihre Augen. Man meint unwillkürlich, die Dohle nehme einen sehr genau in den Blick, ja, sie habe die Fähigkeit, einen Menschen zu durchschauen. (129) [Whenever I see a daw, I am fascinated anew by its eyes. You cannot help but believe that the daw is looking very intensely at you, as if it had the power to look through a person.]

The novel consistently links the world of humans with the world of animals through a structure of mutual observations. At the same time, it widens the scope of the novel to cosmic dimensions.

History from a Bird’s Eye View — Embedding Human History into Natural History Beyer reconstructs history both within the prism of a family history and within the wider framework of natural history. The narrator’s parents were hit by the firestorm when they sought shelter in Dresden’s famous Großer Garten. Their remains lie buried in the Heidefriedhof outside Dresden with many others in an anonymous mass grave (K, 33). But what captures the event for Hermann Funk is not this grave but a split oak in the Großer Garten that visibly bears the marks of the fatal night and has retained the splinters of the bombs in its wood. More than three hundred years old, the “Splittereiche” (split oak) is a unique witness and chronicler of the event. It is a natural object that retains a historical trace: “Hier stecken die Bombensplitter in der Rinde, stecken immer noch” (K, 34; Here the

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splinters of the bombs are lodged in the bark, and they continue to be stuck there) The invisible traumatic impact is rendered visible in Beyer’s detailed description of this tree, which he prefers to encoded images as both a trace and objective correlative for reimagining the bombing of Dresden. Even more than plants, however, birds occupy the center of the novel. The scientific field of ornithology with its terms, classifications, experiments, and practices of taxidermy are described in great detail and take up a large space in the text. The world of birds is placed in the foreground; human relations and stories are relegated to the background and are largely represented through this prism. Approaching historical trauma through the animal world and the ecosystem is a new move in memory fiction,17 and in Beyer’s case the traumatic past is literally approached from a bird’s eye view. In a note to his poem “Atemwende,” Celan once commented on Adorno’s famous dictum prohibiting the writing of poetry after Auschwitz, rephrasing Adorno’s words so as to better understand and refute them: Kein Gedicht nach Auschwitz (Adorno): was wird hier als Vorstellung von “Gedicht” unterstellt? Der Dünkel dessen, der sich untersteht hypothetisch- spekulativerweise Auschwitz aus der Nachtigallen- oder Singdrossel-Perspektive zu betrachten oder zu berichten.18 [No poem after Auschwitz: what is being imagined as a “poem” here? The presumption to consider or report hypothetically or speculatively on Auschwitz from the perspective of the nightingale or the song thrush.]

In Kaltenburg Beyer does exactly that: he represents the trauma of Dresden from the point of view of the birds affected. In so doing, however, he adopts a stance that not only is detached, hypothetical, and speculative, but also links human and animal perspectives. This shift of perspective is a most remarkable aesthetic decision at a time when fictionalizing techniques — as in the case of Jonathan Littell’s Les bienveillantes (The kindly ones, 2006) or Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds (2009) — are deployed to achieve ever-more-hyperreal “cinema images” to reimagine and render the horror of the past. While Littell’s novel aims at exposing the reader to the (porno)graphic horror of Nazi crimes by tearing down the veil, Beyer casts a veil between the reader in the present and the events in the past, creating elaborate levels of mediation and indirection. In this way he emphasizes the distance between the events in the past and our present perception of them. In a paper on new trends in German Holocaust fiction, Meike Herrmann places Beyer in the category of literature in which the Holocaust is presented as a hidden agenda. “It is the hallmark of this highly reflexive type of literature that it frames the Holocaust as a

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blank. . . . In doing so, it is reacting to a growing tendency of appropriating and integrating the Holocaust.”19 Kaltenburg discusses the memory of birds in various lectures. In his explanation for the signals birds use to keep the memory of a concrete danger alive, he emphasizes that we should not polarize between humans and animals when we investigate the potential and the mechanisms of remembering (K, 151). We may well read this as a poetological statement. The author intentionally blurs these perspectives in his novel, creating an encompassing frame of attention and witnessing in which humans are embedded in a larger ecosystem. Kaltenburg’s basic assumption is that observing animals and allowing ourselves to be observed by them facilitates greater insights into humanity. As the example of the split oak tree demonstrates, the ecosystem is not a space that is free of history; instead, it interacts with it, reflecting its impact. The continuum between the human and the animal worlds is the central premise of both Konrad Lorenz and Ludwig Kaltenburg, and it is the aesthetic basis for the construction of the novel. The narrator muses about two worlds, one inhabited by humans, the other by animals, die auf geheime, noch kaum erkennbare Weise miteinander verflochten scheinen, als gebe es irgendwo zu entdeckende Schlupflöcher, durch die man von der einen in die andere hinüberwechseln kann. (K, 379) [which are intertwined with each other in a mysterious and as yet hardly discernable way. Perhaps there are hidden holes to be discovered, through which it is possible to move from one to the other.]

Sebald introduced the notion of the “natural history of destruction” into trauma discourse.20 According to this, the destruction of civilization leads to evolutionary regress and thus to re-barbarization. Under the impact of excessive violence, humans fall back to the level of animals and are caught in a brutal battle for survival. Beyer’s novel prompts the reader to reimagine the trauma of Dresden from the bird’s perspective, asking a series of surprising questions about the fate of animals: What happened to those pet birds that were held in cages when their Jewish owners were deported? What happened to the animal exhibits when natural history museums were bombed? What happened to the birds on the night of the Dresden bombing? How did the animals in Dresden’s zoo react? There are no clear answers to most of these questions, because we do not have any memories, or documents, or sources that record these responses. There are, however, legends, and there is also the possibility of reimagining these events. Beyer reimagines not only the nation but also a world in which both humans and animals are traumatized by the impact of the bombing. He offers us a surreal symbolic image of this, which captures the extra-

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ordinary impact of the all-too-real event: in a trance, humans and chimpanzees collect the mortal remains and carry the burnt corpses into Dresden’s Großer Garten.

Remembering as Reinterpreting Beyer employs veiling techniques and indirect modes of rendering the trauma to sharpen the attention of his readers. However, it is by no means clear that the trauma of extreme proximity to death creates the state of heightened attention and exceptionally sharp vision of the situation thatKaltenburg had supposed. Judging from the narrator, Hermann Funk, the traumatized child may be an affected, but not necessarily reliable, witness of past events. The novel is organized within the frame formed by a series of interviews conducted in 2005 by a young female translator, Katharina Fischer. She interviews the old Hermann Funk, as she wants to learn ornithological terminology from him. In the course of the interviews, however, Fischer’s interests shift to Kaltenburg’s personality, and, by implication, to Funk’s childhood and his formative years with the famous scientist. In the novel she personifies the perspective and hindsight of an alert reader. Hermann Funk’s biography spans three eras of German history: the NS period, the period of the GDR, and the post-unification era. The NS past, culminating in the burning of Dresden, is condensed in a few childhood memories. Funk’s life with Kaltenburg takes place in Dresden prior to the building of the Berlin Wall. After his experience with Stalin, Kaltenburg leaves the GDR, that is, precisely at the moment when the state turns into a repressive system of surveillance. The GDR past is represented in the book by episodes in the Hagemann Family. The father of the clever, independent, and clear-sighted Klara is a scientist who comes from a bourgeois family, the majority of whom fled to the West. This family story offers the reader insights into the oppression and fears of dissident life. The Hagemann daughters are exposed to threats and menaces long before they are able to decode the overt signs of terror in the GDR, such as the disappearance of their neighbors in early morning hours or the sound of the word Vorkuta (K, 179–80).21 The fact that he has lived through three different Germanys hardly qualifies Funk as a historical witness. Like his mentor Kaltenburg, he is not interested in politics. While he has absorbed the ornithological knowledge that Kaltenburg has inscribed into him as a sound and solid memory, his autobiographical memories turn out to be idiosyncratic, partial, fragmentary, and unreliable.22 He is a distracted witness; although he has memories of isolated episodes, he has no idea how to connect and interpret these. Beyer’s approach to the German themes of trauma and guilt is an unconventional and indirect one. His novel tells a child’s story of fascina-

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tion and entanglement. Situated between father and mentor who are colleagues but irreconcilable rivals, the narrator has to decide which “father” to side with. He feels that he has betrayed his parents when an irresistible fascination compels him to nod to the words of Professor Kaltenburg, even though he can hardly understand their meaning (K, 84–85). Hermann chooses Kaltenburg over his father, and from the moment the zoologist enters his life, the memory of his real father begins to fade (K, 75). In opting emotionally for Kaltenburg at the age of seven in Posen, the child feels that he has broken a vital bond and committed treason. It is this sense of guilt that destroyed the relationship between the natural father and his son. Consequently, Hermann is unable to mourn his father, whom has to forget because he cannot face him. It costs Hermann Funk his whole life and great deal of energy to recover the faded memory of his father and to restore the broken bond. This memory eventually comes back, together with historical episodes and ethical questions that had been deliberately eclipsed in Kaltenburg’s scientific perspective and in the horizon of other male protagonists. However, with the help of the two female characters in the book, the interviewer Katharina Fischer and Funk’s partner, Klara Hagemann, the narrator is finally ready to confront these issues. For Funk, making up his mind implies reshuffling and reinterpreting his memories. What had been marginal in his life story finally moves center stage, and what had remained incomprehensible and contingent in the psyche of the child eventually resonates in the mind of the protagonist as part of an important theme. Remembering is presented as a process of filling in gaps. For instance, during his botanical tours with his father the boy registered many trains that passed Posen. These consisted of a few coaches and endless animal containers, even though no animal sounds were to be heard. When he asks where the trains are headed, his father replies: “Nach Osten — oder kennst du die Himmelsrichtungen nicht” (K, 78; Eastward, or don’t you know the points of the compass?) It is impossible to decide whether the father is ignorant of the train’s destination or whether he simply does not want to tell his son, who will only understand this episode, about Auschwitz, later in his life (K, 291). It is up to the readers (with some help from Katharina Fischer) to identify these cues and invest them with retrospective meaning. Young Hermann has no background knowledge about the fate of the Jews yet. This becomes clear when he visits Dresden’s landmarks on the last day that he spends with his parents before the fatal bombings. Having read the sign on Brühl’s Terrace — “Forbidden to Jews” — he mounts the steps, filled with a sense of triumph: “ich ging nicht mehr, ich schritt — die folgenden Stufen empor, wir dürfen auf die Brühlsche Terasse, wir sind keine Juden” (K, 29; I was no longer walking, I was strutting up the steps; we may visit Brühl’s Terrace, we are no Jews). Such triumphalism is however, immediately exchanged for shame, as he is severely reprimanded by his mother. For this reason a sense of guilt pre-

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cedes his knowledge about the murdered Jews. There are other isolated incidents that Hermann and his interviewer later revisit and reinterpret, for example the case of the frail and weak birds that Hermann’s father took into custody. It seems later that these birds may have belonged to Jewish families who had to abandon them when they were deported (see K, 284–85; 298). Despite his efforts, his father was unable to keep any of these birds alive. The presence of the birds thus points to the absence of Jewish neighbors, whose actual disappearance — like the return of the liberated concentration inmates or the dissidents in the GDR — goes unobserved. The “atmosphere of death” associated first with the weak and molested birds eventually turns out to be the larger political context of a murderous state that singles out large parts of the population for physical extinction. Each new reference to these memories in the text is fraught with deeper meaning and a clearer perception of contexts. The reader must jump backward and forward in the text, collecting bits and pieces that fit into the larger picture of a growing puzzle. The image of this puzzle arises from shards and splinters that are scattered across the book and that, taken together, reveal the subliminal and suppressed subtext not only of Hermann’s memory but also of totalitarian German history. It would be a fatal mistake to assume that in this memory novel Beyer waives the topic of German guilt and replaces it with the trauma of a child victim. His novel is rather a compelling analysis of the interaction between remembering and forgetting, between knowing and not knowing. Both knowledge and memory are always incomplete. Funk lives through the different phases of his life with a highly selective frame of attention. The limitation of his perspective has much to do with the people that he is surrounded by. One of Kaltenburg’s convictions had been: “Als Zoologe weiß ich immerhin, es führt kein Weg in einmal überwundene Verhältnisse zurück” (K, 66; As a zoologist, I know that there is no way leading back to conditions that have been left behind). All Funk’s male friends represent the “communicative silence” of the 1960s and 1970s.23 Like Kaltenburg (Lorenz), the younger generation of Spengler (Beuys) and Sieverding (Sielmann) embody the memory of the war, but they do not share their experiences, let alone engage publicly in ethical questions about guilt and responsibility. Spengler (Beuys) was a highly decorated war pilot. His military career marks his face and neck through numerous scars. His trauma, however, finds expression only in his art, which is marked by a mixture of roughness and fragility, and shrouded in silence. His installations have retained the impact of the trauma in their materiality, conveying an uncanny atmosphere of death: “Das Material war von einer gefährlichen Stille umgeben, tot und lebendig zugleich” (K, 59; The material was enveloped by a dangerous silence, simultaneously dead and alive). The gaps and blanks in Hermann Funk’s memory can only be filled by engaging with other points of view, such as that of his partner, Klara Hegemann,

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who was brought up in a politically alert and critical family. Katharina Fischer also helps him to reconstruct his memories, inverting the teacherpupil relationship. Beyer thus constructs a fictional frame in which the protagonist enters into an assisted search for lost time. In contrast to the Proustian mémoire involontaire, however, he does not experience sudden revelations of forgotten moments. Hermann’s search for his past is depicted as a life-long process of retrospective probing. This is very much in contrast to Kaltenburg, who, in his self-serving reconstruction of his identity, has tenaciously resisted any retrospective engagement with his past and has resolutely erased the compromising period in Posen from his biography. The reader accompanies the narrator on a winding and uncertain path, where his earlier memory images are repeatedly reexamined, reimagined, questioned, and reinterpreted. This process of remembering includes the act of reinterpreting one’s memories. It is a life-long and difficult process, because it involves facing what has been marginalized, overlooked, and forgotten in a painful transformation of identity. In his new novel Beyer writes about seven decades of recent German history, including two dictatorships. His access to this huge topic, however, is rather humble and oblique: he covers it under a mass of ornithological special knowledge and terminology. Beyer’s reimagining of German history from a bird’s eye perspective is an artful reassessment of a thirdgeneration writer. He refracts this history through the prism of a family narrative and a story of life-long friendships, focusing on the psychic dynamics of attention and memory. A history that appears to be mastered by way of a defined set of iconic images and messages is retold here from the perspective of a child witness. Judged retrospectively, embodied memory proves, in this case, to be rather deficient. What can be drawn from this novel, however, are minor details which, similar to the Funk’s learning process, help us to reconnect and recontextualize what we already know. Moreover, the reader learns in the reading process that experience evolves in a field that is largely constituted by not knowing. Beyer’s literary approach thus unsettles stereotypes and standard expectations, opening up a new access to the psychic dimension of experiencing history. Even though he does not exclude it altogether, he sidelines the German discourse on guilt,24 presenting terror and fear as the key emotions that connect his various characters from the outset. In adding an ethological perspective, Beyer embeds history within a larger context of natural history, systematically connecting the experience of humans and animals in everyday life and situations of extreme violence. I will close my reading of Kaltenburg by going all the way back to its beginning. The novel opens with a remarkable image: the descent of a jackdaw in a chimney, groping its way downward in search of its nest, which is hidden in total darkness (K, 9–10). This image resonates with literary topoi, such as the mythic descent into the netherworld or Thomas

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Mann’s remarkable opening of his epic Joseph und seine Brüder (Joseph and his brothers, 1933): “Tief ist der Brunnen der Vergangenheit” (deep is the well of the past).25 Beyer’s meticulous description of the path of the jackdaw down the black and sooty chimney in the house of Kaltenburg, seeking support for its beak and legs on the rough walls, moving carefully step by step, holding its balance with its wings in the dark, is not only a superb opening image for this memory novel but also a suggestive emblem for the narrator’s careful, tentative and painful search for himself.

Notes 1

On the wider implications of this shift see Aleida Assmann, Der lange Schatten der Vergangenheit: Erinnerungskultur und Geschichtspolitik (Munich: Beck, 2006); Andreas Huyssen, Twilight Memories: Marking Time in a Culture of Amnesia (New York: Routledge, 1995). 2 Marcel Beyer, Kaltenburg (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2008). Further references to this work are given in the text using the abbreviation K. 3 On the recent wave of family narratives see Aleida Assmann, Geschichte im Gedächtnis: Von der individuellen Erfahrung zur öffentlichen Inszenierung (Munich: Beck, 2007), 70–90; Anne Fuchs, Phantoms of War in Contemporary German Literature, Films and Discourse: The Politics of Memory, 2nd ed. (2008; repr., Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), Friederike Eigler, Gedächtnis und Geschichte in Generationenromanen seit der Wende (Berlin: Erich Schmidt, 2005). 4 In an interview Marcel Beyer emphasized that his ornithological research for this novel was backed up by personal experience with birds and other animals. “Was mich interessierte, hat mit eigenem Erleben zu tun. Man weiss immer, dass man von Tieren umgeben ist, aber man macht sich das nicht klar, dass sie wie in einem Paralleluniversum leben, das räumlich mit unserem eigenen Universum identisch ist.” (What interested me went back to my own experiences. We are always aware of the animals around us, but we don’t realize that they live as in a parallel universe, which shares the same space with ours.) See Jürgen Kaube and Julia Voss, “Mich fasziniert das Weltwissen der Zoologen: Ein Gespräch mit dem Schriftsteller Marcel Beyer,” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ), 15 May 2008, 35. 5 Kaube and Voss, “Mich fasziniert das Weltwissen.” 6 Friedrich Nietzsche, “Menschliches, Allzumenschliches, Fragmente 16 (21),” in Friedrich Nietzsche: Nachgelassene Fragmente, 1875–1879. Kritische Studienausgabe, ed. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1988), 8:261. 7 This area has seen many changes during the last two hundred years: in 1815 the Congress of Vienna allocated it to Prussia. While at first it enjoyed semi-autonomy as a duchy, it was then integrated into the German confederation. The Treaty of Versailles allocated the majority of the province to the Second Polish Republic in 1919. It was occupied by Nazi Germany in 1939.

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On Lorenz’s Nazi past see Benedikt Föger and Klaus Taschwer, Die andere Seite des Spiegels: Konrad Lorenz und der Nationalsozialismus (Vienna: Czernin, 2009). 9 Konrad Lorenz, Das sogenannte Böse: Zur Naturgeschichte der Aggression (Vienna: Dr G. Borotha-Schoeler, 1963). There have been numerous reprints. 10 The new fictional title might be a reference to Fritz Riemann, Grundformen der Angst: Eine tiefenpsychologische Studie, 13th ed. (Munich: Reinhardt, 1978). 11 “Da Kaltenburg so viel von Konrad Lorenz hat, gab es das Problem, nicht bei einer Biographie zu landen” (because Kaltenburg shares so many traits with Konrad Lorenz, there was the problem of how to avoid a biography). Kaube and Voss, “Mich fasziniert das Weltwissen.” 12 W. G. Sebald, Austerlitz (Munich: Hanser, 2001). On Sebald’s architectural topography see Anne Fuchs, “Phantomspuren der Erinnerung in Austerlitz,” in Die Schmerzensspuren der Geschichte — Zur Poetik der Erinnerung in W. G. Sebalds Prosa (Cologne: Böhlau, 2004), 41–66. On Sebald and the archive see J. J. Long, W. G. Sebald: Image, Archive, Modernity (Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2007). See also Anja K. Johannsen, Kisten, Krypten, Labyrinthe: Raumfigurationen in der Gegenwartsliteratur; W. G. Sebald, Anne Duden, Herta Müller (Berlin: transcript, 2008), 25–107; Andrea Tischel, “Aus der Dunkelkammer der Geschichte: Zum Zusammenhang von Photographie und Erinnerung in Austerlitz,” in W. G. Sebald: Politische Archäologie und melancholische Bastelei, ed. Michael Niehaus and Claudia Öhlschläger (Berlin: Erich Schmidt, 2006), 31–45. 13 On melancholy in Sebald see Mary Cosgrove, “Sebald for Our Time: The Politics of Melancholy and the Critique of Capitalism in His Work,” in W. G. Sebald and the Writing of History, ed. Anne Fuchs and J. J. Long (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2007), 91–110. 14 On the notion of impact event and impact narrative see Anne Fuchs, “The Bombing of Dresden and the Idea of Cultural Impact,” in Cultural Impact in the German Context: Studies in Transmission, Reception and Influence, ed. Rebecca Braun and Lyn Marven, 36–57 (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2010). 15 Cit. in Norbert Bischoff, Gescheiter als alle die Laffen: Psychogramm von Konrad Lorenz (Hamburg: Rasch & Röhring, 1991), 55–56. 16 On the problem of attention see Georg Franck, Ökonomie der Aufmerksamkeit: Ein Entwurf (Munich: Hanser, 1998), and Mentaler Kapitalismus: Eine politische Ökonomie des Geistes (Munich: Hanser, 2005). See also Jonathan Crary, Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle, and Modern Culture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001). 17 James Coetzee’s Disgrace (London: Secker & Warburg, 1999). On the fusion of memory fiction and eco-fiction see Axel Goodbody, “Sense of Place and Lieu de Mémoire: A Cultural Memory Approach to Environmental Texts,” in Ecocritical Theory: New European Contributions, ed. Axel Goodbody and Kate Rigby (Charlottesville: U of Virginia P, 2011). 18 Cit. in Axel Gellhaus, “Die Polarisierung von Poesie und Kunst bei Paul Celan,” Celan Jahrbuch 6 (1995): 55.

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Meike Herrmann, “Holocaust-Literatur nach der Holocaust-Literatur? Bilder der Abwesenheit in der jüngsten deutschen Literatur” (unpublished manuscript of lecture delivered at thesis defense, Humboldt Universität Berlin, 28 Apr. 2009), 7–8. A seminal study in this regard is Axel Dunker, Die anwesende Abwesenheit: Literatur im Schatten von Auschwitz (Munich: Fink, 2003). 20 W. G. Sebald, On the Natural History of Destruction: With Essays on Alfred Andersch, Jean Amery and Peter Weiss, trans. Anthea Bell (London: Hamish Hamilton, 2003). 21 “Vorkuta” (German: Workuta) was a Stalin Gulag camp for German prisoners of war and GDR dissidents in the Komi Republic, Russia, operating from 1932 up to the 1950s. 22 An example for Hermann Funk’s unreliable memory is that he supposed that Kaltenburg and his father were colleagues at the Reichsuniversität Posen, but he is later informed that Kaltenburg was professor at Königsberg (Kaliningrad). 23 The term was introduced by Hermann Lübbe, “Der Nationalsozialismus im politischen Bewusstsein der Gegenwart,” in Deutschlands Weg in die Diktatur, ed. Martin Broszat, Ulrich Dübber, and Walther Hofer (Berlin: Siedler, 1983), 329– 49. 24 “Während meiner Arbeit an dem Roman bin ich immer mehr von diesem Klischeebild des Bösen abgekommen. Es hat sich herausgestellt, dass ich dieses Böse gar nicht auf Anhieb erkennen kann. Es ist ja auch sehr beruhigend zu denken: Das Böse ist alles andere als ich selbst. Genau von dieser Selbstgefälligkeit bin ich immer mehr abgekommen.” (While working on the novel, I distanced myself increasingly from the cliché of evil. It turned out that I could not instantly recognize this evil. After all it is quite reassuring to think: evil is everything else other than me. It is precisely this type of complacency that I discarded). See “Ich bin vom Klischeebild des Bösen abgekommen — Interview im Berliner Zimmer: Jasmin Herold im Gespräch mit Marcel Beyer,” Tagesspiegel, 1 Apr. 2008, http:// www.berlinerzimmer.de/eliteratur/marcel_beyer_inteview.htm. 25 Thomas Mann, Josef und seine Brüder, in Gesammelte Werke, vol. 1, ed. Albert von Schirnding (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1983), 9.

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Contributors

PERTTI AHONEN is senior lecturer in European history in the School of History, Classics and Archaeology at the University of Edinburgh. His primary research interests lie in the field of post-1945 German and European history. He is the author of After the Expulsion: West Germany and Eastern Europe, 1945–1990 (Oxford UP, 2003) and Victims of the Berlin Wall (Oxford UP, 2011) and coauthor of People on the Move: Forced Population Movements in Europe in the Second World War and Its Aftermath (Oxford: Berg, 2008). ALEIDA ASSMANN is professor of English literature and literary theory at the University of Konstanz, Germany. Her research areas include the theory of fiction in a historical perspective, media theories of literary writing and reading, and the cultural construction of time and tradition. A central focus is the study of memory on an individual, collective, and cultural basis, including the literary representation of trauma. Her numerous publications include Erinnerungsräume: Formen und Wandlungen des kulturellen Gedächtnisses (1999; Munich: Beck, 2009; English translation: Arts of Memory (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2011), Einführung in die Kulturwissenschaft: Grundbegriffe, Themen, Fragestellungen (2006; Berlin: Erich Schmidt, . 2011); Der lange Schatten der Vergangenheit: Erinnerungskultur und Geschichtspolitik (Munich: Beck, 2006); Geschichte im Gedächtnis: Von der individuellen Erfahrung zur öffentlichen Inszenierung (Munich: Beck, 2007); and Memory in a Global Age: Discourses, Practices, Trajectories, coedited with Sebastian Conrad (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave, 2010). ELIZABETH BOA is emeritus professor of German at the University of Nottingham, UK. She has published widely on German literature from the eighteenth to the twenty-first century, on gender, modernism, and Heimat discourse. Her main publications are Critical Strategies: German Fiction in the Twentieth Century, with coauthor J. H. Reid (London: Edward Arnold, 1972); The Sexual Circus: Wedekind’s Theatre of Subversion (Oxford: Blackwell, 1987); Kafka: Gender, Class and Race in the Letters and Fictions (1996; Oxford: Clarendon, 2002); and Heimat — A German Dream: National Identity and Local Loyalties in German Culture, 1890–1990, with

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coauthor Rachel Palfreyman (Oxford: Clarendon, 2000). She is also coeditor with Janet Wharton of Women and the Wende: Social Effects and Cultural Reflections of the German Unification Process, German Monitor 31 (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1994). PETER FRITZSCHE is professor of history at the University of Illinois. His research focuses on German history in the twentieth century and National Socialism. His publications include Reading Berlin, 1900 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1998); Germans into Nazis (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP 1999), Stranded in the Present: Modern Time and the Melancholy of History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP; 2004), Life and Death in the Third Reich (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2008), and The Turbulent World of Franz Göll: An Ordinary Berliner Writes the Twentieth Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP; 2011). ANNE FUCHS is Professor of German at St Andrews University, Scotland. She has published widely on cultural politics and memory since 1945, modernism, travel writing, and contemporary German literature. Her book publications include “Die Schmerzensspuren der Geschichte”: Zur Poetik der Erinnerung in W. G. Sebalds Prosa (Weimar: Böhlau, 2004); Phantoms of War in Contemporary German Literature, Films and Discourse: The Politics of Memory (2008; repr., Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010); and After the Dresden Bombing: Pathways of Memory, 1945 to the Present (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave, 2011). Edited volumes include W. G. Sebald and The Writing of History, with J. J. Long (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2007); and German Memory Contests: The Quest for Identity in Literature, Film and Discourse since 1990, with Mary Cosgrove and Georg Grote (2006; Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2010). DENIZ GÖKTÜRK is associate professor of German and film studies at the University of California Berkeley. She holds a Dr. phil. from Freie Universität Berlin. Her research focuses on migration, culture, and cinema. She is author of Künstler, Cowboys, Ingenieure: Kultur- und mediengeschichtliche Studien zu deutschen Amerika-Texten, 1912–1920 (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 1998). Edited volumes include Orienting Istanbul: Cultural Capital of Europe? with Levent Soysal and I˙pek Türeli (London: Routledge, 2010); The German Cinema Book, with T. Bergfelder and E. Carter (London: BFI, 2002); and Germany in Transit: Nation and Migration, 1955–2005, with D. Gramling and A. Kaes (Berkeley: U of Carlifornia P, 2007,). She is cofounder of the electronic journal TRANSIT. Current projects: Im/mobilities in a Mediated World, and Uniform Identity: Comedy and Community.

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KATHLEEN JAMES-CHAKRABORTY is professor of art history at University College Dublin. Her research focuses on modern architecture in Germany, the United States, and South Asia. She is the author of Erich Mendelsohn and the Architecture of German Modernism (Cambridge, Cambridge UP, 1997) and German Architecture for a Mass Audience (London: Routledge, 2000). She is editor of Bauhaus Culture from Weimar to the Cold War (Minnesota: U of Minnesota P, 2006). She is currently completing a survey of global architecture since 1400. ANJA K. JOHANNSEN studied German literature and philosophy in Berlin, Providence, RI, and Freiburg. Her doctoral thesis, partly produced during a work stay at University College Dublin, deals with conceptions of space in contemporary German literature. Her publications include Kisten, Krypten, Labyrinthe: Raumfigurationen in der Gegenwartsliteratur; W. G. Sebald, Anne Duden, Herta Müller (Berlin: Transcript, 2008). She has published numerous articles on contemporary German literature and the literary industry. Since 2010 she has been the director of the Literarisches Zentrum Göttingen, a cultural institution in Lower Saxony. JENNIFER A. JORDAN is associate professor of sociology at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee. Her research focuses on Urban Sociology; Sociology of Culture; Theory; Globalization; Europe/Germany; and Sociology of Food. Her publications include “Landscapes of European Memory: Biodiversity and Collective Remembrance,” History and Memory 22, no. 2 (Fall/Winter 2010): 5–33; “Elevating the Humble Dumpling: From Peasant Kitchens to Press Conferences,” Ethnology 47, no. 2 (Spring 2008): 109–121; “The Heirloom Tomato as Cultural Object: Investigating Taste and Space,” Sociologia Ruralis 47, no. 1 (January 2007): 20–41; “Structures of Memory: Understanding Urban Change in Berlin and Beyond (Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 2006); and “Memorials as Sites of Social Integration in Berlin?” German Politics and Society 24, no. 4 (Winter 2006): 77–94. JÜRGEN PAUL is emeritus professor of art history at the Technical University, Dresden. His areas of research include architectural history, medieval architecture, and nineteenth-century architecture. His publications include Der Palazzo Vecchio in Florenz: Ursprung und Bedeutung seiner Form (Florence: Olschki, 1969); Das Rathaus im Kaiserreich: Kunstpolitische Aspekte einer Bauaufgabe im 19. Jahrhundert (Berlin: Gebr. Mann, 1982); Cornelius Gurlitt: Ein Leben für Architektur, Kunstgeschichte, Denkmalpflege und Städtebau (Dresden: Hellerau, 2003); “Bauwerk und Symbol: Die wiederaufgebaute Dresdner Frauenkirche und die Rekonstruktionen zerstörter Baudenkmäler,” Die Dresdner Frauenkirche, Jahrbuch 11 (Weimar: Böhlau, 2005).

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LINDA SHORTT is lecturer in German at the University of Bangor. After her undergraduate studies at University College Dublin and the Humboldt Universität Berlin she carried out her PhD research under the auspices of the UCD Humanities Institute with an extended research period at the University of Constance. Her research focuses on contemporary German literature and culture and representations of old age, illness, and death in literature and films. She is currently revising her thesis, Pathologies of Belonging? Generation, Place and Rebellion in Post-Unification Literature, for publication in 2011. She is coeditor with Aleida Assmann of Memory and Political Change (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave, 2011). ANDREW J. WEBBER is a professor of modern German and comparative culture at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of Churchill College. He has published widely on German and comparative literary, cinematic, and visual cultures. His most recent books are The European Avant-garde: 1900–1940 (Cambridge: Polity, 2004); Berlin in the Twentieth Century: A Cultural Topography (Cambridge: CUP, 2008); coedited with Emma Wilson, Cities in Transition: The Moving Image and the Modern Metropolis (London: Wallflower, 2008); and coedited with Uta Staiger and Henriette Steiner, Memory Culture and the Contemporary City: Building Sites (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave, 2009).