Introduction

Summary

HISTORIES ARE NEVER just neutral accounts of the past. Rather, past events are selected, shaped, and linked into narratives that are told in order to make sense of, and give meaning to, the present. Individuals, families, religious communities, political parties, and other groups use them as vehicles to communicate how they arrived where they are, how they want to be seen and understood. Above all, the cultural construction of these narratives, understood in the broadest possible sense, is one of the central planks in the formation of national identity, the collective myth-making which so often essentializes the otherwise contingent nation-state. In the German Democratic Republic (GDR), this was always a particularly fraught endeavor. Formed out of the ruins of the Second World War and lacking both national and democratic legitimacy, the GDR and its ruling Marxist-Leninist party, the SED, ascribed immense significance to historical narratives as a source of self-legitimation. Most urgently, this meant constructing an unimpeachable antifascist tradition out of the experience of National Socialism, of which the new state and its ruling party could claim to be the indisputable heirs. Looking further back, the SED strove to construct a political and cultural heritage that could support the idea of a continuous progressive humanist tradition from the Enlightenment, via the 1848 revolution, to this first socialist state on German soil. In the GDR, these always highly selective and contested processes became an integral element in an official cultural system through which the repressive one-party state exercised power. And the otherwise routine propagation and negotiation of these narratives in the cultural realm became a political and ideological struggle of the utmost importance.

The fourteen essays in this book, grouped into five thematically coherent sections, tackle these issues from a deliberately diverse set of standpoints. In keeping with the interdisciplinary aims of the series, they cover a wide range of cultural domains and media: film, architecture, design, literature, music, and visual art. They treat antifascist and socialist traditions developed within the GDR itself and bourgeois traditions inherited from the early twentieth century and beyond. They examine the cultural legacies of exile and National Socialism, of realism and modernism, and of classicism and romanticism. They explore the construction of tradition in monuments and exhibitions, in household objects and forms of literary publication, in individual works and in whole academic disciplines.