Former GDR Historians in the Reunified Germany: An Alternative Historical Culture and its Attempts to Come to Terms with the GDR Past

Abstract

The German Democratic Republic (GDR) was founded in 1949 and existed for just over 40 years as a self-consciously socialist German state which defined itself in stark contrast to the capitalist Federal Republic of Germany (FRG). Following Germany's total defeat in 1945 and Allied occupation, the country was divided into zones of occupation. In the ensuing Cold War, the three western zones eventually formed the FRG while the Soviet zone became the GDR. Both Germanies developed their own economic, political and cultural sub-systems after 1949, although close ties existed between the two countries in a variety of different areas well into the 1950s. As far as German historiography was concerned, a separate GDR historians' association was only founded in 1958, following complaints by East German historians about discrimination against themselves at the biennial historians' conference of the all-German historians' association in Trier. The institutional separation of FRG and GDR historiography continued apace thereafter, and historians on both sides of the divide eyed each other with suspicion and ideological enmity. While the historians of the FRG built fruitful contacts with American, British, French and generally western historiographies, GDR historians oriented themselves towards the perceived model of Soviet historiography. A rapprochement between the two Germanies and their historiographies only took place in the context of Neue Ostpolitik from the second half of the 1960s onwards. Just before the GDR came to its inglorious end, Alexander Fischer and Giunther Heydemann, in their extensive review of GDR historiography, distinguished between three phases of its development: only the third and final one was described as a 'phase of increasing scientificity (Verwissenschaftlichung), which started in the early 1970s and was characterized by a genuine dialogue between party and historians as well as a remarkably extended theoretical and