1989 and all that

Abstract

This chapter examines views of the 1918–19 Revolution during the transition from Cold War division to German reunification in the late 1980s. It also takes the reader through the 1990s, a decade dominated by debates on the Holocaust rather than the First World War, and into the early years of the twenty-first century, a time of transition. It demonstrates that parts of the intellectual baggage of the Cold War were already being jettisoned in the period before the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989, while other aspects took until 2009 or even later to cease casting a shadow over scholarly debates. Meanwhile, the peaceful revolutions in the GDR and across the Soviet bloc in 1989 also reshaped the way in which the ‘problem’ of revolution in German history – including in 1918–19 – was categorised, with less emphasis now placed on national narratives and frameworks. The chapter’s last section looks at what remains of other East German classical leftist interpretations from the mid-twentieth century, charting their continuing, albeit far from complete or irreversible, decline in the years since the end of the GDR.