ABSTRACTS & BIOS

Martin Brady, King's College London

1989 and beyond: the legacy of GDR New Music

 

'Durch die “Wende” endgültig von der Illusion befreit, Musik könnte irgendwelche Veränderungen auslösen, will ich weiterhin versuchen, die “Umwelt” ein bißchen freundlicher tönen zu machen. Eisler wollte die Dummheit in der Musik bekämpfen … er selbst hielt den Kampf Ende der 50er Jahre (im Gespräch mit Hans Bunge) für verloren. Nun gut, “wir” haben keinerlei Chance: nützen wir sie.'
(Reiner Bredemeyer, September 1995)
 

New Music (so-called “E-Musik”) was one of the greatest artistic achievements of the GDR, but also its most over-looked since 1989. Under the enlightened tutelage of first generation modernists – Paul Dessau, Hans Eisler, Rudolf Wagner-Régeny – the GDR saw an extraordinary flowering of experimental “classical” music which included not only “difficult”, serial experiments and challenging orchestral and chamber works, but also electronic music and many different kinds of Gebrauchsmusik for stage, screen, and public occasions. By the 1970s extreme formal experimentation, inconceivable in the other arts, was being practiced by the pupils of Dessau and others. Often surpassing Western colleagues in complexity and musical innovation, especially in terms of dialectical juxtapositions and daring stylistic pluralism, this second generation of composers saw their works performed in the West (commissioned by the Arditti String Quartet and others), but in many cases also in the GDR itself, with numerous record releases on such record labels as Nova and Eterna. This paper is a celebration of this unjustly ignored legacy by example: Dessau, Friedrich Goldmann, Reiner Bredemeyer, Georg Katzer, Paul-Heinz Dittrich, Lutz Glandien, Jörg Herchet and others will be introduced with musical excerpts (from sound recordings and films) to demonstrate that a reappraisal of the GDR’s contribution to musical modernism is needed for a balanced understanding of post-War musical modernism in Europe.

 

 

David Clarke, Cardiff University

Making a Space for Ritual: GDR Regime Loyalists after the End of State Socialism

 

This paper examines the memory activism of GDR regime loyalists since German unification, paying particular attention to the activities of the Ostdeutsche Kuratorium von Verbänden e.V. (OKV), a civil society organization that brings together a range of groups who seek to defend the memory of the GDR as a socialist alternative and challenge the state-mandated memory of contemporary Germany. As well as exploring the discursive means by which the OKV and its members construct an alternative account of the history of the GDR and its collapse, this paper will pay particular attention to the organization's use of ritual, specifically its 'alternative' commemoration of German unification, which takes place on 3 October every year. Bringing together insights from ritual studies and memory studies, the paper offers an analysis of the creation of ritual spaces by those who feel marginalization by the dominant memory regime.

 

 

Ute Feldner and Heiko Feldner, Christ College Brecon/Cardiff University

The Devil Take the Hindmost: the Meaning of 1989

 

The systemic illiteracy of modern work societies towards their own conditions of existence asserts itself most effectively today in the shape of three powerful mythologies: the historical grand narrative of ‘1989’, which celebrates the unceremonious demise of communism in Europe as a triumph of free-market economics and liberal democracy; the economic tale of ‘creative destruction’, according to which the capital valorisation economy can renew itself eternally; and the libertarian ‘end-of-work-society’ discourse, which renders the decomposition of contemporary work societies into a blueprint for a future beyond work. Mutually reinforcing in their denial of the historical finitude of capitalism as a mode of production and way of life, these mythologies shield us from the traumatic realisation of the depth of the eco-ecological catastrophe unfolding before our eyes. This paper will take a closer look at the first mythology. What, if not a historical triumph of free-market economics and liberal democracy, will ‘1989’ have come to signify some fifty years from now?

 

 

Tom Hedley, Trinity College Dublin

Im Osten nichts Neues? Topologies of Continuity in Marc Bauder’s Das System: Alles verstehen heißt alles Verzeihen

 

In the wake of the “Mauerfall” of 1989, the crumbling East German republic was subsumed into the West – a transition that led to the enduring narrative that 1989 and the subsequent collapse of the DDR represents the wholesale triumph of “New Capitalism” over Soviet socialism. In his seminal work, The Corrosion of Character, sociologist Richard Sennett identifies a central trait of those who are truly “at home” in neoliberal systems like the one that developed in a reunified Germany: the capacity to let go of one’s past. Prevailing in post-1990 Germany demands, by this logic, a decisive break from the recent history of the “neue Bundesländer”, and this paper seeks to examine how robust Sennett’s observation really is by focusing on Marc Bauder’s relatively under-discussed 2012 film Das System. 

Set in post-reunification Rostock, Bauder’s film depicts how the young, disaffected protagonist Mike Hiller, a resident of the city’s economically deprived “Plattenbau” quarter, is drawn into the shady business dealings behind the development of a fuel pipeline in the region. In this paper it is argued that Bauder creates a peculiar tethering of space and time that not only defies the Bachelardian spatial understanding, but also challenges Sennett’s claim that success in the neoliberal present requires a break from the past. With a topology honeycombed by secret Stasi bunkers and DDR landmarks, where the furtive methods of the communist past are no different to the sly tactics of the capitalist businessmen and the DDR’s “old guard” have seamlessly transitioned into positions of power, Bauder asks us what has really changed. In short, Das System conceives of a past that cannot be let go, precisely because it is fused irrevocably to the present, fundamentally undermining the prevailing narrative that 1989 ushered in a comprehensive break from the socialist republic. 

 

 

Nick Hodgin, Cardiff University

Kosmonauts: the past's presence and futures past

 

In this paper I speculate on the significance of certain visual features of the GDR past after the GDR.  The paper considers the interplay of futures remembered and pasts experienced and the relevance of that interaction to our understanding of the GDR,  looking at the enduring appeal of cosmic culture and especially the figure of the cosmonaut as referenced across a range of media. Surveying its representation in both historical and contemporary culture, the paper traces the evolution of the cosmonaut as symbol, which was originally representative of socialist achievement and progressive humanism, and examines the ways in which it has come to be represented in visual and popular culture at a time when “the pendulums of the public mindset and mentality,” as Zygmunt Bauman has argued, have performed “a U-turn: from investing public hopes of improvement in the uncertain and ever too obviously un-trustworthy future, to re-investing them in the vaguely remembered past, valued for its assumed stability and so trustworthiness.”

 

 

Michał Krzykawski, University of Silesia Katowice

1989 or the Downfall of European Social Democracy (An Eastern-European Perspective) 

 

'Capitalism cannot abide a stable social order. This was already stated in the Communist Manifesto: “All that is solid melts into air”; whatever resists change will be pitilessly swept away. Security, stability and salvation can be only imaginary, mythical or religious.  The void left by the disappearance of the communitary social order rooted in tradition is filled by the nation, national sentiment and nationalism.' -- André Gorz (1991)
 

Signed on February 1992, the Maastricht treaty has legitimized the most neoliberal political economy on the planet from a monetary perspective, leaving European society under capitalism open to the logic of competition, notably between Frankfort and Paris, and the irrationality of financialisation as a consequence of the free-market doctrines of Chicago School of Economics, which have been systematically destroying “social Europe” since 1973 oil crisis. The meaning of 1989, I argue, needs to be revisited in a strict relation with the rise of neoliberalism in Europe and the downfall of European social democracy, which largely amounts to the collapse of the European reason (Patočka) or the European spirit (Stiegler). 

In this paper, I will try to show to what extent this downfall of European social democracy can shed new light on the meaning of the 2004 EU enlargement. In fact, what happened thirty years ago and what it actually means to us today has to be approached through what happened fifteen years ago, when post-Soviet states were supposed to “return back to the European family.” Rereading 1989 along with 2004 and in the context of the rise of neoliberalism after 1973 does not only show that Europe was economically constructed on the basis of the binary logic of Cold War and remained totally blind to the technological transformation within capitalism, which has drastically changed the world on a planetary level. It also explains today’s rise of right-wing populisms in Eastern Europe as a dreary consequence of how “the economic reason” actually worked in post-socialist societies (Gorz). 

However, instead of providing another critique of neoliberalism, this paper will focus on the link between the regular madness which is heavily hitting everyday public life in Eastern Europe and the loss of the raison d’être, if not the loss of reason, by the European left since 1989 to date. In fact, not only did European social democracy appear unable to respond to “the irrational motives of rationalization” (Gorz) but also misrecognized the social change involved by the technological revolution. Therefore, the question asked by André Gorz in 1990: “Which way is left?” is still a live issue although it requires different answers.

 

 

Janine Ludwig, University of Bremen

Remembering unrealised ambition in forgotten literature of the Wende

 

In the fall of 2019, three regional elections in East Germany with strong results for the AfD displayed a general feeling of discontent there. Thus, there has been talk in the media about possible mistakes made in the 1990s in dealing with the ramifications of the Wende and with the specific past of the East Germans: Has the West not listened enough to them, not tried to understand their experiences in the GDR and afterwards?

If one wants to do this now belatedly, literature can help. While the German Feuilleton called for the ultimate “Wenderoman“ all through the 90s, it overlooked many small, diverse, peripheral pieces that could have told of how East Germans perceived the change of their whole world: with surprise, curiosity, sometimes sadness or anger, often irony.

The talk will analyse Bernd Schirmer’s Schlehweins Giraffe (1994), a parody on the turn of eras as high-speed gridlock: A writer who doesn’t write but collects new words finds himself with a giraffe through whose eyes he sees the new world in all its grotesqueness.

Short glances will be thrown at three more texts: Kerstin Hensel’s Tanz am Kanal (1997) in which the female protagonist is homeless and tells her victim biography as an unreliable narrator. In Jens Wonneberger’s picaresque novel Wiesinger. Der Mann mit Hacke und Spaten (1999), a gravedigger disappears – an outsider in the GDR and afterwards as well. Rainer Kirsch’s mini-drama Der Mehrzweckschreibtisch (1999) shows the interrogation of a poet about possible collaboration with the Stasi.

 

 

Stephan Petzold, University of Leeds

Normalising Dissatisfaction: Popular Music in the late GDR and the Coming of the 1989 Revolution

 

Existing explanations of the 1989 revolution in the GDR usually foreground the internal economic demise, the impact of reforms in the Soviet Union and the desire for freedom championed, all leading to a crisis of legitimacy of the SED and the GDR. Such readings imply that the material reality of the economic crisis or the political actions of the SED regime translated directly into dissatisfaction and a readiness to protest. Relatively little attention has been given, however, to exploring how this crisis of legitimacy was made sense of by GDR citizens and what it meant to them. This paper wants to start addressing this by examining how understandings of crisis and dissatisfaction were created and circulated in GDR popular media and culture, with a particular focus on how popular music created meaning about everyday life and GDR society. There has been a fair amount of interest in dissident subcultures such as punk, folk or hiphop but very little on mainstream music. I will argue that, in the late 1980s, mainstream rock music became an important cultural space in which some dissent and dissatisfaction could, within certain limits, be expressed. This is particularly important because of the popularity and relatively wide reach of mainstream rock music. This shows not only how particular meanings of dissatisfaction were created and circulated but also how certain levels and understandings of dissatisfaction proliferated and were, ultimately, normalised. The paper therefore challenges conventional histories by asking how precisely dissatisfaction became a widespread phenomenon in the autumn of 1989, something that a focus on material conditions or, at least until 1989, widely unknown opposition groups cannot explain. In this sense, it also develops a methodological critique and calls for a greater focus on the role of popular culture in the disappearance of the GDR.

 

 

Evelyn Preuss, Yale University

1989: The Meanings of a Revolution and the East German Legacy in Global Perspective

 

The images of the Berlin Wall falling went around the world. Thirty years on, as if on a loop, they still do, creating a mediality that frames 1989 as a climactic moment. 

Accordingly, 1989’s most obvious meaning is that of a media event. As the East German revolution floats through the digital space, its signified is detached from the signifier, obfuscating 1989’s historical trajectories. 

I would like to argue for rehistoricizing 1989, showing that it does not present a climax, but instead a mere leap in a continuum along the interplay of several globalizations. One of them, Neoliberalism, spread globally at the latest since the end of 1960s. East Germany proved not immune. Starting in the Honecker era, it sold out to the West. Seen in this trajectory, the VIIIth Party Rally precipitates the fall of the Wall, while the post-1990 development of East Germany merely continues the neoliberalist deprivation of the public’s economic base as well as the stratification of society according to market segments. 

Meanwhile, dissident voices and movements partake in a grass-roots globalization that has its origins in the 19th century emancipatory and socialist programs. Contrary to post-1990 historiographies that appropriate pre-1990 East German oppositional movements for a neoliberalist ideology, East German dissidents in many instances sought to correct the party line where it failed to protect basic tenets of socialist society. The legitimacy of East German leadership was not contested for building socialism, but for its shortcomings in doing so, above all, its failure to surrender managerial control for a more democratic political process, its repressive regime and its divestiture of public property. This grass-roots effort to intervene in political and economic decision-making continued seamlessly post-1990: each year following 1989 saw more and more decided protests against neoliberalist politics than 1989 itself. Again, 1989 presents more of a leap along a continuum than a caesura. 

Yet, this does not diminish the draw of 1989 re-defined as media event. What captures the global imagination is its utopic moment of openness, of the glimpse of another world possible, of an alterity to the before and after. After all, cutting the signified from the signifier has also enabled a reevaluation of East Germany in recent years that have placed greater emphasis on its accomplishments.

 

 

Jakub Szumski, Polish Academy of Sciences Warsaw/University of Jena

Ordinary Stasi, the Discovery of Corruption and the Fall of East German Socialism

 

During the final months of the German Democratic Republic, its citizens experienced a slow demise of their socialist homeland. They also made startling discoveries. Through media and everyday encounters, they experience the dire economic situation, foreign debt, mass emigration and police brutality.

To make things worse, the East German media started to inform about cases in which party and state leaders exploited their public roles for private gains and abused their official privileges. The nationwide grassroots movement to expose such cases began. Ordinary citizens, in probably the last act of civil engagement in the GDR, investigated local wrongdoings on their own, sent letters to the media, informed the communist party and law enforcement agencies. The discovery of official corruption and misuse of office, a quintessential un-socialist behavior, led to a deep sense of failure of the socialist project, which was carried on to the unified Federal Republic.

This presentation, based on a chapter of my forthcoming dissertation, tells a story of rank-and-file Stasi and Volkspolizei functionaries, who during the last year of the GDR attempted to expose and make public cases of corruption and office abuse among high ranking superior officers. After the fall of the Berlin Wall the fate of the regime hinged on the behavior of ordinary policemen and state security functionaries. Often unbeknownst to the public and against the will of the authorities, these groups pursued their own agendas, distanced themselves from their superiors and made autonomous claims.

 

 

Peter Thompson, University of Sheffield

The GDR, Class and the Primacy of Politics

 

In 1989 Brandt is supposed to have said that "that which belongs together will now grow together". 30 years later this seems to be far from the case. If anything, East and West seem to be diverging more by the day and the tensions and conflicts between the two sides over questions of nationalist populism, xenophobia and even the new rise of fascism is on the agenda. This paper will attempt to answer the questions about why this is. Is there something structural in the nature of Germany to do with Prussian heritage or demographic change or the experience of two authoritarian regimes which is causing this rift and divergent development? My argument will be that the two parts of Germany never belonged together. And that it will be many years, if ever, before they grow together. The whole Western world is in a process of tumultuous change and there is no reason to think that Germany would be exempt from this change, just because it went through the Wende. The fall of the Berlin Wall was simply a very small and yet highly symbolic representation of the tectonic changes that have been going on in the world since the mid-1970s.

 

 

Ernest Ženko, University of Primorska

Requiem for the Second World: The Political Unconscious in Wolfgang Becker’s Good Bye Lenin!

 

A strategy, in which understanding of art as a code language that enables to recognise relevant social processes and calls for the decoding with the help of a critical analysis, is often perceived as one of the most original and valuable contributions of the Frankfurt school. American Marxist cultural critic Fredric Jameson, who has been heavily influenced by this intellectual tradition, further advanced this approach, and associated it with several concepts, pertinent to the cultural critique of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. Political unconscious, cognitive mapping, nostalgia, utopia and postmodernism, form a theoretical constellation that can be used to interpret anything from architecture to science-fiction novel and beyond. Yet, it turns out that at the stage of late capitalism (after Ernest Mandel), the most important medium is not painting, architecture or literature, but cinema, the seventh art, which is at the same time a product of the most sophisticated forms of industrial production. It is cinema in which the distinctions between high and low art have more or less vanished and where culture and economics cross. But also, it is cinema, which more than any other medium provides the possibility of combining local traditions with global culture. In the presentation, Jameson’s approach to cultural and particularly film criticism is used to interpret one of the more notable films about the dissolution of the German Democratic Republic, a 2003 film entitled Good Bye Lenin!, written by Bernd Lichtenberg and directed by Wolfgang Becker. In the reading of the film, Jamesonian concepts and approaches are used in an attempt to show how this film reveals the political unconscious of a specific historical situation, and how it contributes to the process of cognitive mapping, which enables (or disables) a subject to place himself/herself on the geopolitical map in a society after the end of the Second World.