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.

FRED WANDER (1917–2006) IS AN AUTHOR whose distinctive contribution to twentieth-century life writing in German is only just beginning to be recognized. He attracted some initial attention in the GDR — as an Austrian exile living there on a long-term visa — when his largely autobiographical cycle of Holocaust stories, Der siebente Brunnen (The Seventh Well), was published in East Berlin in 1971. A West German paperback edition followed, but not until 1985, enjoying a more muted measure of esteem than might have been expected in the decade when the Holocaust finally became a major focus of cultural activity there. A first translation into English, in a series generally viewed as an outlet for East German propaganda, made no perceptible impact at all. When Wander left the GDR, in the early 1980s, as disillusioned as most of his literary contemporaries there had become by the stagnation of the socialist experiment, there was a real risk that he would fade into obscurity as a one-book author. Back in his native Austria, unable to establish a cultural foothold there, he remained largely in the shadows until he was rediscovered in his late eighties by an enterprising German publishing house, the Wallstein Verlag in Göttingen.

Wallstein's new edition of Der siebente Brunnen (2005) included a supportive afterword by Ruth Klüger, author of the highly praised Holocaust memoir weiter leben (Still Alive) of 1992. Klüger's endorsement made reference to Wander's subsequent autobiographical writing, notably Das gute Leben (The Good Life) of 1996, but it was essentially a tribute to Der siebente Brunnen as an original and discrete contribution to Holocaust literature. She referred to his years in the GDR and his close relationship with East Germany's best-known author, Christa Wolf, but without considering the extent to which Wander's breakthrough work had emerged from a society in which life writing had taken on special importance as a mode of resistance to the official cultural doctrine of socialist realism. Wander had, however, been closely associated with Wolf since the 1960s and was involved in the East German cultural debates about the importance of “subjective authenticity” to literary credibility that preceded the publication of Der siebente Brunnen.

The Appeal of Life Writing

THIS VOLUME OF ESSAYS examines life writing after major turning points in Germany's history in the twentieth century: the First World War, the Nazi era and beyond, the collapse of the GDR, and German unification. German life writing in the twentieth century in the form of autobiography has often attracted considerable public attention, perhaps because a personal account captures the mood or a mood of the time. Erich Maria Remarque's semi-autobiographical account of a soldier's experiences in the First World War, Im Westen nichts Neues (All Quiet on the Western Front, 1929), sold 1.2 million copies by 1933. Autobiography may also gain a large audience because of the prominence of the author. Some nine million copies of Adolf Hitler's Mein Kampf (My Struggle), a mixture of autobiography and political treatise, published in two parts in 1925 and 1926, were sold or distributed by 1940. Its significance today tends to be located in its contribution to the debate about what Germans could have known about the long-term intentions of the Nazis, even if there is reason to suppose that many people who owned a copy of Mein Kampf had not actually read it.

A prominent author making dramatic personal disclosures will also capture the public's attention: Günter Grass's 2006 autobiography, Beim Häuten der Zwiebel (Peeling the Onion), created a sensation with its revelation that he was a member of the Waffen-SS towards the end of the Second World War.

Life writing has received much attention from academic researchers. Dagmar Günther registers historians’ growing interest in autobiographies as source material, and academics themselves have contributed to the production of life writing. The West German historian Lutz Niethammer and a team of researchers worked with some 150 East Germans shortly before the collapse of the GDR to produce “lebensgeschichtliche Interviews” (life history interviews). “Opa war kein Nazi” (Grandpa Was No Nazi, 2002) is based on a series of forty family discussions and 142 interviews with individuals from three generations, conducted in the late 1990s and designed to elicit what “normal Germans” remembered of the Nazi period. The study contrasts historical knowledge with collective family memories and feelings about the past, created from the accounts handed down by family members who experienced National Socialism directly.