Abstract
If the unification of Germany on 3 October 1990 in one sense healed a wound that had festered since the end of the Second World War it also opened up the ground for vigorous debates about the identity of the new Germany. The 1990s were characterized by a series of ‘memory contests’ which questioned virtually every aspect of the German past both before and after 1945, and which repeatedly posed questions about the present and the future. The celebration of the twentieth anniversary of the events of 1989–90 underlined the ongoing nature of almost all of those early debates, which gives the culture of contemporary Germany much of its distinctive vitality, diversity, earnestness and openness.
The 12 essays collected in a new volume edited by Anne Fuchs, Kathleen James-Chakraborty and Linda Shortt capture some of that diversity and provide a useful orientation. They are divided into three groups. The first examines ‘historical and sociological reflections’ and focuses on ‘1989 and the rehabilitation of German history’. Peter Fritzsche meditates on 1989 as a caesura in German and world history. Pretti Ahonen looks at how the Mauerschützenprozesse (trial of former East German border guards) revealed conflicting attitudes to the recent past among East and West Germans respectively. Jennifer A. Jordan’s essay on ‘Apples, identity and memory in post-1989 Germany’ is a fascinating study of how marketing an ordinary product such as the ‘German apple’, with all of its regional subsets (Swabian apples, etc.) and different cultivation traditions (Streuobstwiesen, intensive orchards, etc.), was shot through with historical resonances and old and new regional rivalries.
The second group of essays focuses on ‘architectural and filmic mediations’. Here Andrew Webber reprises themes of his 2008 book on Berlin by analysing Christian Pezold’s Gespenster and by reflecting on Berlin as a city still haunted by its past. The ‘second life’ of the Berlin Wall in film, in Germany and internationally, is recounted by Deniz Göktürk. Kathleen James-Chakraborty documents the architectural rewriting of Berlin since the early 1990s through struggles that have now largely been resolved in favour of a balance between the old and the new. That this balance is often uneasy and that ‘restoration’ in particular can involve sacrifice and loss is demonstrated by Jürgen Paul’s essay on Dresden: while the reconstruction of the Frauenkirche was a triumph, the attempt to reconstitute the neighbourhood around it has simply been an exercise in façadism in the interests of the tourist industry.
The third group of essays explores ‘retrospective reimaginings’ through the medium of contemporary German literature that invokes memories of the ‘death and afterlife of East and West Germany’. Elizabeth Boa demonstrates how fractured historical experience is mediated through literary form in the works of a wide range of (former) East German authors. Linda Shortt does the same for West Germany with a particular focus on Joachen Schimmang’s Das Beste, was wir hatten (2009). Anja Johannsen compares and contrasts the ways in which Monika Maron and Angela Krauss work through the problems of responding to a fractured past which the reader has not herself experienced personally. Anne Fuchs reprises (or, rather, narrowly anticipates, since this volume appeared in 2011) her 2012 book on Dresden with an essay on Durs Grünbein’s Porzellan: Poem vom Untergang meiner Stadt (2005). One of the best chapters in this group is Aleida Assmann’s unravelling of the complex layers of history and memory encoded in Marcel Beyer’s Kaltenburg (2008), a novel which spans the two German dictatorships and the early Berlin Republic and which Assmann links with the slew of ‘memory’ novels published around 2000. As a snapshot of a work in progress, this survey of the cultural identity debates of the first 20 years of the (re)unified Germany has much to commend it.
The ten essays edited by Susan G. Figge and Jenifer K. Ward in Reworking the German Past have a more specific focus. They examine the way that treatments of the past in literature, film, photomontage, opera, popular song and in the museum exhibition in fact adapt, interpret and sometimes even distort the past in the interests of making a particular episode or sequence of events comprehensible to an audience in the present. The study of these various kinds of ‘adaptations’, the editors believe, is a particularly effective way of tracing, as the back cover text proclaims, ‘Germany’s obsessive cultural engagement with its twentieth-century history’.
The essays are organized in three sections according to the time period with which they deal, though many refer to more than one period or contain reference to a wide range of historical periods and contexts. In ‘reworkings in/of Weimar’, first, Cary Nathanson analyses the Nazi film Die Degenhardts as a remake of Murnau’s Der letzte Mann which sought to lay to rest all the anxieties of the Weimar period, especially its crisis of masculinity. Rachel Epp Buller then examines the use of photomontage in the 1920s by Alice Lex and Marianne Brandt to criticize what they perceived to be the growing regimentation and militarization of the Weimar years.
The second section is entitled ‘Vergangenheitsbewältigungen: adaption and coming to terms’, which represents a rather problematic interpretation of that pivotal German term meaning ‘working through’ in a much more challenging and problematic way rather than simply coming to terms. Here six essays cover the range from the late 1920s to the present. Richard Figge examines four film adaptations of Erich Kästner’s Emil und die Detektive from 1931 to 2001, showing how each represented a different response adapted to the needs of its audience. Susan Figge and Jenifer Ward analyse adaptations of works by Böll, Seghers and Jurek Becker in relation to their portrayal of the Nazi period. Maria Euchner discusses Götz Friedrich’s 1981 film version of Strauss’s Elektra, illuminating the context both of Strauss’s choice of music and of Friedrich’s introduction of themes of post-war remembering and forgetting to give the timeless myth greater resonance in the present. Sunka Simon uses paired settings of popular songs to show how new recordings of songs of the Weimar and Nazi periods engage in a questionable ‘re-mediation’ exercise by rehabilitating problematic cultural manifestations of the past in the ‘new’ Germany of today. Finally in this section two essays examine radical adaptations of biographical histories. Thomas Sebastian analyses the recasting of Elisabeth Langgässer’s 1946 novel Das unauslöschliche Siegel in her daughter’s 1986 (originally Swedish-language) Gebranntes Kind sucht das Feuer, in which Langgässer’s illegitimate daughter with a Jewish father seeks to repudiate her mother’s Catholic interpretation of the Holocaust. Finally, Elizabeth Baer examines W. G Sebald’s ‘intertextual borrowing’ – denounced as plagiarism by its originator, Susi Bechhöfer – in Austerlitz and argues that this was in reality a form of restitution, the imaginative restoration of ‘what memory has forgotten, or what memory has erased’ (p. 196). Like Sebastian’s essay on Langgässer and her daughter, Baer’s chapter illuminates the conflict between a Holocaust survivor and a gentile German, which throws the ethics of appropriation and adaption into sharp (and rather problematic) relief.
The third section comprises two essays devoted to ‘resetting German identities after the Wende’. Irene Lazda recounts the way in which Alltag was turned into Alltagsgeschichte in the Wittenberg Haus der Geschichte and the Berlin DDR Museum. Secondly, Mareike Herrmann analyses the way in which Doris Dörrie adapted a selection of her own stories to make her 1998 feature-length film Bin ich schön?, reworking them subtly for the film but also employing the structure and themes of Schnitzler’s play Reigen (1897) to combine them into a single kaleidoscopic film.
The editors suggest that reworking the past for the present in the ways discussed in this volume ‘offers the potential for destabilizing anew established or authoritative narratives and for opening up new understandings about the past and about evolving relationships between the past and the present’ (p. 11). The last part of that statement may well be true. The first part, by contrast, is likely to apply only to the work discussed in the chapter on museums. As a whole, however, this volume does indeed provide a fascinating insight into the ubiquity of the problematic past in virtually every area of German cultural production.