Memory Matters and Contexts: Remembering for Past, Present and Future

Abstract

The East German past has been the focus of much debate and scholarly work in Germany since reunification in 1990. The official and government-sponsored discourse on this past is known as Aufarbeitung, the ‘reworking’ of the past, which regards the era of socialism as one part of the nation’s doppelte Vergangenheit, the ‘double burden in history’. Aufarbeitung comes with a very clear view of what the GDR was, the ‘SED-dictatorship’, and of what the present is, the free and democratic republic, a dichotomic mirror image of the ‘unjust’ and totalitarian socialist regime.1 While the term SED-dictatorship, which is central to this discourse, seems to limit dictatorial rule to the ruling socialist party, it is fundamentally underpinned by an understanding that this aspect of the GDR shaped everything else: from the outcomes of elections to individual professional choices, cheap foodstuffs and low rents. More often than not it is thus used to mean the ‘GDR-as-dictatorship’ (see Beattie, 2008). Faced with a population that does not always seem to agree with these basic premises, Aufarbeitung has become a technique of governance that tries to form collective memory through commemoration, musealisation, education and research. The discourse is fashioned largely by concerns in the present, about citizens’ disengagement with politics and nostalgic sentiments about socialism, the loathed Ostalgie, which ‘whitewash’ the former regime.