The Unbuilding of East Germany: Excavating Biography and History

Abstract

Background to Professor Molly Andrews' longitudinal research project: In 1992, Molly Andrews conducted interviews with 40 East Germans, most of whom had been leading critics of the East German government, and had played an important role in contributing to the bloodless revolution of 1989. They included artists, actors, religious leaders, scientists, and politicians, but also official employees and informal informants of the Stasi, as well as academics, writers and politicians who were members of the Communist Party up until 1989. The 1992 study was supported by the Max Planck Institute of Berlin. Twenty years later, supported by the Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin fur Sozialforschung and the University of East London, a follow-up study was conducted with fifteen of the original forty participants, predominantly with those who had been dissidents in 1989. The translator, Birgit Schmitt, was used for the 1992 and 2012 interviews. Based on this longitudinal study, two exhibitions were organized, timed to coincide with the 25th anniversary of the opening of the Berlin Wall: the first was at the German Historical Institute, London (31 October 2014–31 January 2015), and the second at the Wissenschaftzentrum, Berlin (12 November 2014–31 March 2015).