The Oral History Project: Student Insights into the German Wende

Abstract

This abridged version of Bertolt Brecht's poem, Fragen eines lesenden Arbeiters, demonstrates the one-sidedness of viewing history through the eyes of the personages to the neglect of the little Posterity often learns only what is recorded of the actions and thoughts of the powerful, the famous, and the wealthy. As Jeremy Brecher points out, history was written from above. What ordinary people thought and what they tried to accomplish was regarded as insignificant, not even regarded as part of history.2 Brecher's view-shared by Brecht-is that history from the ground up complements the story that professional historians tell about the great people. This paper seeks to show how I developed an oral history interview project for a college-level study abroad program in the former East Germany, which can serve as a model of active interdisciplinary learning of German language, history, and culture. In order to supplement textbook and press accounts of this complex time since the fall of the Wall, and before time fades the memories of the ordinary people, I organized a university study abroad program in conjunction with the Europa Universitct in Frankfurt/Oder in Spring of 1998. Both students and faculty felt that an oral history or ethnographic interview project could provide the xtra dimension to form a composite view of this historically and culturally significant event of German reunification. George Marcus notes in Writing Culture that, Ethnographies have always been written in the context of historic change: the formation of state systems and the evolution of a world political economy.3 Traditional study abroad programs emphasize language and cultural study, but the oral history project provided an interdisciplinary focus to our program. As Roland Barthes notes