De lange wortels van het Nieuwe Berlijn - Over de periodisering van de Duitse herinneringscultuur

Abstract

This article argues that German Unification did not cause a break in the memory-politics of the Federal Republic. Instead, more fundamental changes in German historical culture seem to have taken place in the early 1980s, and then again in the late 1990s. The argument begins from the observation that many of the historical symbols of the ‘New Berlin’ are deeply rooted in the ‘old’ West Berlin or in Bonn. Here, the shift in memorydiscourse from Vergangenheitsbewältigung to the concept of remembering itself had already started in the decade before the fall of the Wall. This West German development continued into the period of unification in the 1990s and also informed the construction of the ‘New Berlin’ as a memory-scape of the united Germany. Such lines of continuity also explain why East German stories and experiences were hard to integrate into the discourse of the 1990s.