Reflective Nostalgia and Diasporic Memory: Composing East Germany after 1989

Abstract

The redrawing of borders in post-communist Europe led to a significant transformation of the continent’s diasporic landscape. The migration that followed the collapse of the Iron Curtain resulted in the reintegration of certain long-established diasporas into their ethnocultural homelands. 25 per cent of Bulgarian Turks, for example, were repatriated to Turkey in 1989 (Stewart, 2003: 30), while the following decade saw an influx of 1,630,000 Russian Germans to Germany (Pohl, 2009: 280). At the same time, entirely new diasporas were created, not by the movement of people across borders, as has traditionally been the case, but by the movement of borders across people. With the fragmentation of Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union into smaller nationalising states, various ethnic communities were separated from their national homelands and subjected to processes of othering. Rogers Brubaker (2000: 2) describes this type of diasporic formation as ‘accidental’. ‘Accidental diasporas’, he observes, ‘crystallize suddenly following a dramatic — and often traumatic — reconfiguration of political space’.