1.

Record Nr.

UNINA9910792731303321

Autore

Gallinat Anselma

Titolo

Narratives in the making : writing the East German past in the democratic present / / Anselma Gallinat

Pubbl/distr/stampa

New York : , : Berghahn Books, , 2017

©2017

ISBN

1-80073-008-X

Descrizione fisica

1 online resource (242 pages) : illustrations

Classificazione

NB 5550

Disciplina

943/.1087

Soggetti

Anthropology and history - Germany

Collective memory - Germany

Germany (East) Historiography Social aspects

Lingua di pubblicazione

Inglese

Formato

Materiale a stampa

Livello bibliografico

Monografia

Nota di bibliografia

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Nota di contenuto

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Illustrations -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction: Questions of Discourse, Narrative, and Memory after Fundamental Regime Change -- Chapter One. Remembering East Germany in the United Nation: The Second German Dictatorship and Dual History -- Chapter Two. Institutions That Write Memory: The Working Group Aufarbeitung and the Daily Paper Introduced -- Chapter Three. Debating the Past at the Daily Paper: The East German Border Regime -- Chapter Four. Ordering Memory for Government: Everyday Life in East Germany -- Chapter Five. What Makes an Aufarbeiter and a Journalist? -- Chapter Six. Democracy in Trouble: Remembering to Safeguard the Future -- Chapter Seven. Memory for Citizenship: The Trouble with Democracy -- Conclusion -- Glossary -- Bibliography -- Index

Sommario/riassunto

Despite the three decades that have passed since the fall of the Berlin Wall, the historical narrative of East Germany is hardly fixed in public memory, as German society continues to grapple with the legacies of the Cold War. This fascinating ethnography looks at two very different types of local institutions in one eastern German state that take divergent approaches to those legacies: while publicly funded organizations reliably cast the GDR as a dictatorship, a main regional



newspaper offers a more ambivalent perspective colored by the experiences and concerns of its readers. As author Anselma Gallinat shows, such memory work—initially undertaken after fundamental regime change—inevitably shapes citizenship and democracy in the present.