Commemorating communist East Germany in the Berlin Republic: Modes of remembrance in literature,film,and memorial sites.
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文摘
This dissertation studies how the Berlin Republic commemorates Communist East Germany and investigates how this engagement is translated into cultural memory. I understand cultural memory as dynamic,multifaceted,and as a widely contestational interplay of past and present in socio-cultural contexts. The making of cultural memory involves various participants and allows us to examine the nexus between individual remembering and culturally mediated memory. Culturally mediated memory appears as a process of the representation and manifestation of the past in the present. By studying the mediality of present pasts,we gain an understanding of how the past is remembered and how it is mediated via cultural objects in the present. My dissertation analyzes two texts by East German writer Christa Wolf,the novella Was bleibt 1990) and the novel Stadt der Engel oder The Overcoat of Dr. Freud 2010),Andreas Kleinerts film Wege in die Nacht 1999) and Florian Henckel von Donnersmarcks Das Leben der Anderen 2006),and two memorial sites,the former State Security prison Berlin-Hohenschonhausen and the largest GDR prison for women Hoheneck. The objects reveal that the present past is not the alignment of a society with a certain narrative of historical time. The various modes that translate memory into cultural form constitute society and bring individuals into communication as society. They show how society continually establishes itself as it redefines its relationship to the remembered past. The objects capture remembrance as an act of reinvestigating Vergangenheitsbeziehungen,relationships to the past. Instead of recalling the past in order to turn the page on a troubled history and thus strive for Vergangenheitsbewaltigung,the objects make apparent how past experiences are continually renegotiated,transformed,and utilized in order to respond to present needs. This project understands remembering as a development. It describes remembering and acts of memorialization as Vergesellschaftung,sociality. Memory appears as the moment of sociality when remembering instantiates and results in a mutual relationship between individuals and social groups,in which remembering is performed. We see how society arises and experiences itself in its remembering and how remembering as experience in itself offers society an experience of itself.