6 - Mediating Immediacy: Historicizing the GDR by Bringing It Back to Life in Postmillennial Works of Fiction

Summary

The Twentieth Anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall in 2009 was marked to a much greater degree by a spirit of celebration than the tenth anniversary. Whereas shortly before the turn of the millennium the consequences of German unification were still judged critically, it was now the euphoric mood of the “peaceful revolution” that was commemorated. Indeed, the fact that the term “revolution” is now being used again is in itself an indication of a change of attitude: during the latter half of the 1990s it appeared as though the consequences of the fall of the Wall had led to a denial of the “revolutionary” aspect of the demonstrations of 1989. Greater historical distance from the events of the Wende and Germany’s political unification has undoubtedly played a role in promoting such a shift. Where the memory of the German Democratic Republic and its remembrance in the public sphere of united Germany is concerned, however, debates have continued to be intense. Going to the heart of Germans’ identity and self-image, these debates have tended to focus on the issue of coming to terms with the activities of the Stasi and its extensive network of informants, but to a greater extent still on the most appropriate way to characterize the GDR. These ongoing tensions are illustrated, for instance, by the debate that erupted in 2009 over the question of whether it should be referred to as an “Unrechtsstaat.”

Through its depictions of the GDR, the Wende, and life in united Germany, over the past twenty years literature has both reflected and played an active role in these processes of societal transformation. Naturally it has also experienced its own ups and downs: the wave of autobiographical reckonings with the past published in the aftermath of the Wende was followed in the mid-1990s by descriptions of the transformation processes and then, at the end of that decade, by retrospective engagements with the GDR past from the perspective of a younger generation of authors. Since the millennium, retrospective accounts of the “peaceful revolution” and of the protests and demonstrations that made it possible have predominated.

Novels published over the past decade have been characterized above all by a tendency toward historicization.