Normalizing Memory in Reunified Germany

Umerziehung durch rote Bibliotheken: SED-Bibliothekspolitik 1945/46 bis zum Ende der 1960er Jahre

The representation of East Germans in elite positions has been a broadly debated topic. Most studies show that, comparative to other elite sectors, East Germans are best represented in politics. However, in some areas of the political sector, like the federal government, we find very few East Germans, despite Angela Merkel’s chancellorship. This paper looks at East German representation in parliamentary leadership positions. It finds East Germans remain underrepresented in these positions, especially outside of The Left. It explores three explanatory approaches: (1) there are not enough East Germans in the recruitment pool, (2) East German members lack the desired qualifications and (3) the leadership recruitment process is biased against East Germans. Using statistical analysis based on a biographical dataset including all MPs from the 13th to the 18th legislative period, it finds that both low East German membership in the Bundestag and the existence of a bias lead to underrepresentation of East Germans in those positions. While The Left tries to strongly represent East German interests by recruiting them into leadership positions, East Germans’ access to these positions in all other party parliamentary groups remains low. This has negative effects on the substantive representation of East Germans and on their trust in representative democracy.

The article examines the role of children's magazines in promoting internationalism and solidarity in the German Democratic Republic (GDR). Analysing the magazines ABC-Zeitung, Bummi, and Frösi, it sheds light on their contribution to the GDR's system for collecting and distributing charitable donations and to cultivating children's commitment to countries in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. The article uncovers multifaceted layers of meaning associated with internationalism and emphasizes the significance of the connection between the state-ideological and the everyday levels. Its analysis of primary sources, including articles from the children's magazines, files from the Federal Archives, and historical publications, reveals that the magazines played a crucial role in fostering international solidarity and shaping the political consciousness of young readers. The use of techniques such as suggestion, competition, and renunciation in the magazines not only evoked a sense of collective responsibility, but also positioned children as active contributors to shaping an international socialist future. The children's magazine Bummi is particularly significant in the GDR's charitable donations system as it shows the involvement of other parts of society and thus raises issues of transgenerational education through the medium of children's magazines. By shifting away from the narrative of indoctrination, this article highlights the broader understanding of internationalism in the GDR and its integration into everyday life. It therefore underscores the vital role of children's magazines not only in fostering a stance of anti-imperialist solidarity among young readers, but also in shaping the GDR's vision of an international socialist future.

The increase of allergies in East Germany--reaching West German prevalence shortly after the reunification--is considered a model for the allergy epidemic in the western world. Whether such a pattern was observed in all comparison studies and for all allergic manifestations is not known because a complete overview is missing. Hints about possible causal factors for the allergy epidemic could be gained by identifying known risk factors, which explain the observed pattern of allergy development in Germany. Again, an overview about these efforts is missing. We identified 14 cross-sectional studies conducted after 1989 and calculated prevalence ratios (West/East) for asthma, hayfever, eczema and allergic sensitization. Additionally, a tabular overview about the explanatory power of risk factors hypothesized in the nineties and covering outdoor exposure, indoor factors, early childhood influences, nutrition as well as awareness is given. At the time of the German reunification, the prevalence ratio West/East was largest for hayfever and sensitization to birch pollen, less pronounced for the other phenotypes and even less than one for atopic eczema. Hayfever and sensitization to birch pollen also showed the steepest increase in East Germany afterwards. Single-room heating with fossil fuels and living as only child in a family were identified as explaining up to 23.5% of the excess trend in East compared to the trend in West. Hayfever as most typical atopic disease showed the difference in allergy pattern between East and West Germany clearest. Risk factors identified for these phenotypes are completely different (single child) or even act in the opposite direction (single-room heating) from classical risk factors for airway diseases. This might be the most important lesson from the West/East German experience. It already stimulated many other studies focussing on protective factors such as microbial stimulation.

Cosmopolitanizing Colonial Memories in Germany

This chapter outlines the official politics of memory in the German Democratic Republic (GDR) in relation to National Socialism. It charts the development of anti‐fascist memory in the GDR and discusses the relationship between the commemoration of the anti‐fascist resistance struggle and the ruling Socialist Unity Party claim to legitimate power. It seeks to situate anti‐fascist memory within the GDR's official memory politics more generally and discusses the relationship between this official memory and the ways in which ordinary GDR citizens interpreted Germany's history. The place of the Holocaust in the GDR's official politics of memory is also discussed. Finally, the chapter examines the controversy surrounding the anti‐fascist legacy of the GDR in post‐unification Germany.

A substantial amount of literature dealing with conceptualisations of the nation has neglected the importance that gender and the politics of reproduction play in the construction of national identities. Analysing images of political campaigns and activists as well as public discourses on motherhood, abortion and childcare, I will illustrate the importance that gender and sexuality assumed in German nation-building projects before and after its unification in 1990. After 1949, East and West German ideas of nationhood were premised on opposing ideas of gender roles, in that politicians within these two German nations mobilised distinct gender identities to assert their respective political system as superior and progressive. While in East Germany, the progressiveness of the socialist project was measured along the lines of women’s integration into the labour force; in West Germany, the idea that a woman’s identity was primarily rooted in motherhood played an influential role in nationalist discourses. Once East and West Germany reunified in 1990, these opposing ideas of gender roles clashed. This became particularly visible in the context of political debates around abortion and childcare. An analysis of these debates suggests that the “new” unified German nation was premised upon a story in which the West German idea of the housewife-breadwinner model prevailed. This was diametrically opposed to what was framed as the East German “woman-worker” who had free access to abortion, and was abjected as immoral and backward. Analysing how such a national story was constructed is highly valuable, as it elucidates the ways in which gender has become a constitutive and structural element in the nation-building process of unified Germany to the present day.

The history of the subject, or, in a different parlance, genealogies of the self, has received increased attention in recent years. Numerous scholars, historians and cultural sociologists alike have inquired about the practices and discourses that shape the (post-)modern self. And while this is by no means an exclusively German debate – indeed, major influences come from French, British and Israeli scholarship –, it is a debate that is particularly thriving within German-speaking scholarship on recent (West) German history, perhaps in part due to how graduate training and networking function in German academia. Somewhat remarkably, East German subjectivities are barely ever addressed in this debate, which speaks to the fact that historiographies of East and West Germany are still rather separated, despite repeated calls to overcome this division. A possible historical (rather than historiographical) reason for this lack of interest that would deserve further inquiry might be that the selfbecameimportant for historical actors in the Federal Republic during the 1970s, but not in East Germany. It would be equally interesting to know to what extent similar or different regimes of subjectivity emerged across the Iron Curtain and what happened to them after the end of communism – that is, if and how the ‘neoliberal’ regime of subjectivity that scholars have described for Western Germany spread to the East. Yet, these are open questions.

In the wake of the German Democratic Republic's collapse in 1989–90, the new all-German Bundestag made special arrangements for the holding and use of the records of its infamous Ministry of State Security (MfS, or Stasi). They were handed over, not to the Bundesarchiv (Federal Archive), which would have kept them from public examination for 30 years, but to a new special authority, the Bundesbeauftragte für die Unterlagen des Staatssicherheitsdienstes der ehemaligen Deutschen Demokratischen Republik (BStU, or Federal Commissioner for the Records of the State Security Service of the former German Democratic Republic). The law governing the Federal Commissioner's work, the Stasi-Unterlagen-Gesetz (StUG), came into force at the end of 1991. The current federal commissioner, Frau Marianne Birthler, succeeded her predecessor, Dr Joachim Gauck, late in 2000. The Federal Commissioner is required to report to the Bundestag every two years on her activities and has accordingly reported six times since 1991. This article examines the BStU's work since 2001 and draws heavily on the sixth report (2003). It chiefly examines the two great issues which arose in those two years: the litigation over the MfS file of the former Federal Chancellor, Dr Helmut Kohl, which led in 2002 to the fifth amendment of the Stasi-Unterlagen-Gesetz, and the acquisition by the BStU of the microfilmed card indexes relating to the agent network of the MfS's foreign intelligence service, the Hauptverwaltung Aufklärung (HVA, or Main Intelligence Directorate). As will be seen, in both cases the Federal Commissioner managed to ensure that the principles of the revolution of 1989–91 were upheld.

Inspired by the concept of the English psychiatrist Maxwell Jones, the Brandenburg proposition or thesis towards the "Therapeutic Community" was formulated in 1974. Its objective was to transform the therapeutic environment in psychiatric hospitals of the German Democratic Republic (GDR). Based on sources from the Federal Archive in Berlin and for the first time from the Historical Archive of the Asklepios Hospital in Brandenburg, the motivation, implementation and effect of the so-called Brandenburg proposition will be analysed within its socio-political context. Although it was not able to exert a broader influence on the provision of psychiatric care, important impulses for the development of social psychiatry and psychotherapy in the GDR were nonetheless given. The discussions on the concept of "therapeutic community" illustrated that this concept was supposed to coincide with the socio-political objectives of the Socialist Unity Party of Germany (SED) and their principles of collective education.

The publication presents the memoirs of professor, Father Yuri Mytsyk about Soviet Ukrainian germanist Anatolii Zavialov. Yuri Mytsyk worked with Anatolii Zavialov at the same department from 1974 till 1989, and from 1975 carried out the duties of his deputy. Zavialov’s academic life and his teaching career in 1960s-2000s was connected to Dnipropetrovsk university. At that time Zavialov actively studied the contemporary history of the German Democratic Republic, he was the author of many articles, including texts in prominent scientific journals, tutorials and published two monographs. He was one of the few Soviet germanists, who had business trips not only to the German Democratic Republic, but also behind the “Iron Curtain”. Zavialov also had the experience of teaching in the universities abroad. As the head of the department of world history, Zavialov made efforts to form a research direction in historical German studies at the university. The majority of dissertations, defended under his scientific supervision, were devoted to German history of the XXth century. Some of his graduate students-germanists continued their career at the department, and it became possible to create a strong center of German studies and turn the department of world history into a center of historical germanistics. To provide the opportunities to publish research in German history, in 1973 the scientific edition “The Questions of German History” was founded at the department of world history of Dnipropetrovsk national university, later it received the status of inter-university scientific edition. Articles here were published by historians-germanists from Soviet Union and the German Democratic Republic. After the fall of the Berlin Wall and the reunification of Germany, the study of the history of the German Democratic Republic went bankrupt and Zavialov turned to the history of German diaspora in Ukraine. He focused on political history of the German colonies at the beginning of the XXth century and the questions of the history of colonization in civilizational dimension. The last years of the historian`s life were over shadowed by a sharp deterioration of health and decline in scientific activity.

In order to situate the current debate on whether the Federal Commission for the Files of the State Security Service of the former German Democratic Republic (the Stasi Archive) should cease to be an autonomous institution in the larger context, this article traces the history of the Stasi Archive and of the Stasi Files Law since 1989. Key to understanding the Stasi Archive and access to its files is the 1989 revolution which saw demonstrators demand access to information gathered by the secret police. Although the research quasimonopoly that the Stasi Archive enjoys would be ended by integration into the federal archives, file access for Stasi victims-the raison d'être of the archive-would be jeopardized. Calls for the dismantling of the Stasi archive are, therefore, premature. Some criticism can be directed at the vetting and trial process in East Germany since 1989, but it is important to remember that the Stasi Archive acted only in a support capacity for those activities.

Introduction

<i> Taking on Technocracy: Nuclear Power in Germany, 1945 to the Present. </i> Dolores L. Augustine. New York: Berghahn Books, 2018. xiv + 289 pp. Illustrations, graphs, notes, bibliography, and index. Cloth $120, e-book $110.16.

The mental-cultural situation of the re-united GermanyIn 1993 an exhibition presenting phenomena about the past, present and future of both East and West Germany took place in Berlin. It became clear that West and East Germans differ in inter alia the way in which life and existence have been experienced. East and West Germans also have different perspectives and perceptions of policy and society. Among the former GDR-citizens, nostalgia dominates the reflection on the past. It should, however, not be underestimated how deeply East and West Germans have been alienated from each other and that many East Germans think that facing a common future - together with West Germans - is more than they could handle. The difference in which life and existence have been experienced in East and West Germany is also reflected in German literature as is pointed out in the work of Ulrich Woelk. It also becomes, however, clear that the idea of a common German culture and history supplies a strong link to overcome these alienations.