Remembering 1989
Future Archives of Public Protest
9780226835334
9780226835327
9780226835341
Remembering 1989
Future Archives of Public Protest
This account of the “laboratory of radical democracy” in the months before East Germany’s absorption in the West challenges memories of Germany’s reunification.
For many, 1989 is an iconic date, one we associate with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Cold War. The year prompts some to rue the defeat of socialism in the East, while others celebrate a victory for democracy and capitalism in the reunified Germany. Remembering 1989 focuses on a largely forgotten interregnum: the months between the outbreak of protests in the German Democratic Republic in 1989 and its absorption by the West in 1990. Anke Pinkert, who herself participated in those protests, recalls these months as a volatile but joyous “laboratory of radical democracy,” and tells the story of how and why this “time out of joint” has been erased from Germany’s national memory.
Remembering 1989 argues that in order to truly understand Germany’s historic transformation, we must revisit protesters’ actions across a wide range of minor, vernacular, and often transient sources. Drawing on rich archives including videotapes of untelevised protests, illegally printed petitions by Church leaders, audio recordings of dissident meetings, and interview footage with military troops, Pinkert opens the discarded history of East European social uprisings to new interpretations and imagines alternatives to Germany’s neoliberal status quo. The result is a vivid, unexpected contribution to memory studies and European history.
For many, 1989 is an iconic date, one we associate with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Cold War. The year prompts some to rue the defeat of socialism in the East, while others celebrate a victory for democracy and capitalism in the reunified Germany. Remembering 1989 focuses on a largely forgotten interregnum: the months between the outbreak of protests in the German Democratic Republic in 1989 and its absorption by the West in 1990. Anke Pinkert, who herself participated in those protests, recalls these months as a volatile but joyous “laboratory of radical democracy,” and tells the story of how and why this “time out of joint” has been erased from Germany’s national memory.
Remembering 1989 argues that in order to truly understand Germany’s historic transformation, we must revisit protesters’ actions across a wide range of minor, vernacular, and often transient sources. Drawing on rich archives including videotapes of untelevised protests, illegally printed petitions by Church leaders, audio recordings of dissident meetings, and interview footage with military troops, Pinkert opens the discarded history of East European social uprisings to new interpretations and imagines alternatives to Germany’s neoliberal status quo. The result is a vivid, unexpected contribution to memory studies and European history.
368 pages | 38 halftones | 6 x 9 | © 2024
History: European History
Literature and Literary Criticism: Germanic Languages
Reviews
Table of Contents
List of Figures
Preface
Introduction: From Neoliberal Triumph to Protest Memory
Chapter 1: Erasing ’89–90 from the Capital
Intertext: Soviet Specters in the Periphery
Chapter 2: Pacifying Memory
Chapter 3: Possible Archives
Chapter 4: Provisional History
Chapter 5: Futures of Hope
Coda: Unbound in the Open
Acknowledgments
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Preface
Introduction: From Neoliberal Triumph to Protest Memory
Chapter 1: Erasing ’89–90 from the Capital
Intertext: Soviet Specters in the Periphery
Chapter 2: Pacifying Memory
Chapter 3: Possible Archives
Chapter 4: Provisional History
Chapter 5: Futures of Hope
Coda: Unbound in the Open
Acknowledgments
Notes
Bibliography
Index