Cultural Resistance to the Iconic Images of November 1989

From The Perspective Of cultural memory, one of the most unexpected publications marking the twentieth anniversary of the GDR’s collapse was the anthology of essays Die Nacht, in der die Mauer fiel (2009).This volume, subtitled Schriftsteller erzählen vom 9. November 1989, includes contributions from twenty-five authors equally divided in terms of their East and West German origins and offering a range of generational perspectives, from the seventy-year-old Volker Braun to the thirty-five-year-old Antje Rávij Strubel on the eastern German side. In his introductory overview the editor, Renatus Deckert, acknowledges that there are problems inherent in attempting this kind of survey of authors’ memories. He sees a division between those who have already given their experience of 1989 “die Gestalt einer festgefügten Erzählung” that they are not inclined to modify, and those who have problems holding on to the distinctiveness of their personal memories in the face of the “Lawinen von Fernsehbildern, die alle Jahre wieder am 9. November ausgestrahlt werden” (15). For this second group Deckert envisages the process of reconstructing “diese Nacht oder diese Tage im Herbst 1989” as an opportunity for them to reach a better understanding of this period in their lives — “sich … selbst auf die Spur zu kommen,” as he puts it (15).

The reason the volume came as a surprise is the fact that so many authors from the ex-GDR have regularly expressed their annoyance at being asked to remember their past in terms of what the visual media, in their construction of collective memory, have singled out as the “great event” of their lifetime. The author Ingo Schulze, who was not among the contributors to the anthology, published an essay of his own in 2009 articulating the reasons for this widespread reluctance. In his essay, entitled “Mein Westen,” he complains that the only questions the many organizers of anniversary occasions want to have answered are twofold: “Wie haben Sie den 9. November erlebt?” and “Was muss getan werden, um die [deutsche] Einheit zu vollenden?” What irritates him most about this way of thinking about the events of 1989–90 is its complacency:

Mein Eindruck ist, dass die meisten Frager von diesem Thema zutiefst gelangweilt sind… . Bestenfalls spekulieren sie auf eine nette Anekdote.