Narratives in the Making : : Writing the East German Past in the Democratic Present / / Anselma Gallinat.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter Berghahn Books Complete eBook-Package 2016
• VerfasserIn: Gallinat, Anselma,
• Place / Publishing House: New York; , Oxford : : Berghahn Books, , [2016]; ©2016
• Year of Publication: 2016
• Language: English
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (242 p.)

Despite the three decades that have passed since the fall of the Berlin Wall, the historical narrative of East Germany is hardly fixed in public memory, as German society continues to grapple with the legacies of the Cold War. This fascinating ethnography looks at two very different types of local institutions in one eastern German state that take divergent approaches to those legacies: while publicly funded organizations reliably cast the GDR as a dictatorship, a main regional newspaper offers a more ambivalent perspective colored by the experiences and concerns of its readers. As author Anselma Gallinat shows, such memory work—initially undertaken after fundamental regime change—inevitably shapes citizenship and democracy in the present.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Illustrations -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction: Questions of Discourse, Narrative, and Memory after Fundamental Regime Change -- Chapter One. Remembering East Germany in the United Nation: The Second German Dictatorship and Dual History -- Chapter Two. Institutions That Write Memory: The Working Group Aufarbeitung and the Daily Paper Introduced -- Chapter Three. Debating the Past at the Daily Paper: The East German Border Regime -- Chapter Four. Ordering Memory for Government: Everyday Life in East Germany -- Chapter Five. What Makes an Aufarbeiter and a Journalist? -- Chapter Six. Democracy in Trouble: Remembering to Safeguard the Future -- Chapter Seven. Memory for Citizenship: The Trouble with Democracy -- Conclusion -- Glossary -- Bibliography -- Index