Thirty years ago, on October 3, 1990, two German states became one. The academy, however, had a long way to go before it could begin to make a similar claim. The relatively swift dismantling of the “Wall on the ground” did not occasion an equally swift dismantling of the so-called “Wall in the head,” especially within the historical field in the new Federal Republic. Young scholars from the “Workers’ and Peasants’ State” launched their careers as professional historians in a profoundly different political and social context than the one into which they had been socialized. Few would describe this new academic constellation as “unified.” This forum developed, on the occasion of the thirtieth anniversary of the events of 1989–1990, as an attempt to understand the ways that having lived through a world-historical transition has impacted the work of historians from the former German Democratic Republic. It explores the ways these scholars’ experiences—lived experiences of a necessarily transnational kind of history—have shaped their appreciation of the project of history: its form, its purpose, its promises, and its limits. It considers the ways the academy in the new Federal Republic did and did not make room for these scholars and their historiographical perspectives. It reflects on the power of culture, politics, and memory on conceptualizations of the past. To engage with these themes, Central European History's editor invited Jennifer Allen (Yale University) to convene a forum. She invited Stefan-Ludwig Hoffmann (University of California, Berkeley), Christina Morina (Universität Bielefeld), and Patrice Poutrus (Universität Erfurt) to participate.

Babylon Berlin (henceforth BB) premiered in Germany on the pay channel Sky TV in October 2017 and in the United States on the streaming service Netflix in January 2018. It is based on Volker Kutscher's series of crime novels set in late Weimar Republic and early Nazi-era Berlin. At its center are the lives and investigations of the laconic and tormented police detective Gereon Rath and his charismatic and irrepressible assistant Charlotte (Lotte) Ritter. In anticipation of the series premiere on public television, marathon screenings took place in 150 cinemas across Germany, where audience members dressed up in 1920s fashion and enjoyed a Currywurst break. Its viewership in the Federal Republic was topped only by the global fantasy behemoth Game of Thrones. The series is clearly modeled on American series such as Mad Men (2007–2015) and The Wire (2002–2008) as it unfolds a complex web of characters and subplots with loving attention to the history and fashions of the time. Indeed, this collaboration of seasoned directors Tom Tykwer, Achim von Borries, and Henk Handloegten is the most expensive German TV series to date. The fact that BB premiered on pay TV while having been largely produced with public funds drew some ire. German reviewers questioned both the circumstances of its production and its creative ambition. While Der Spiegel called it “a masterpiece,” one much debated blog review went so far as to call it “pure crap,” which neither reflected historical truth nor carried artistic merit. Many critics faulted the series for trading in postcard clichés and creating a 1920s “Berlin Disneyland.” The weekly Die Zeit complained that there was a little too much cute dialect, such as “icke” and “kiek ma,” which made the critic sometimes feel like wiping the dirt makeup off the proletarian faces. (And indeed, one of the numerous intertexts of this series are Heinrich Zille's unflinching depictions of proletarian misery.)

In the early years of the FRG and GDR, cultural diplomacy was largely defined by each country's need to establish a role for itself within its respective Cold War bloc. In the sphere of foreign policy, competition between East and West Germany to achieve recognition both from Western states and the so-called Third World was heightened by the FRG's Hallstein Doctrine (1955–1970). Cultural diplomacy offered a route outside traditional channels of diplomacy to convince foreign politicians to support or at least have favorable views of either German state. The cultural diplomatic media of this early period focused on each state's rebuilding and adherence to international treaties as well as on countering the legacy of the Second World War. As division continued into the 1950s, cultural diplomacy on each side of the iron curtain worked to cultivate an image of a peaceful, friendly state superior both to its Nazi predecessor and to its rival across the German-German border, setting the terms for an image-building contest that would continue throughout the Cold War.

By retracing the history of the Protestant journal Eckart, this article examines a theological forum in which supporters and opponents of the Nazi movement came into direct contact. Specifically, the article evaluates political ambiguities among religious authors, who had openly rejected Nazism from the 1920s onward but would feel compelled by theological considerations to remain loyal to the regime after 1933. Analyzing contemporary discussions of the Protestant Two Kingdoms Doctrine, for example, puts historiographical distinctions between “resistance” and “collaboration” into question. This study shows that Protestant intellectuals were able to voice a limited degree of public criticism until World War II. Their criticism, however, was often so imbued with nationalism and ideals of loyalty that it effectively helped stabilize the Nazi regime. In Eckart, even critics engaged deeply with völkisch and anti-Semitic ideology. Finally, this article also shows how these authors perpetuated nationalist ideas in West Germany after 1945.

To better understand the position of Jews within Germany after the end of World War II, this article analyzes the rebuilding of Jewish communities in East and West Germany from a Jewish perspective. This approach highlights the peculiarities and sometimes sharply contrasting developments within the Jewish communities in the Federal Republic of Germany and the German Democratic Republic, from the immediate postwar months to the official East-West separation of these increasingly politically divided communities in the early 1960s. Central to the study are the policies of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, which exemplify the process of gradual divergence in the relations between East and West German Jewish communities, that, as this article demonstrates, paralleled and mirrored the relations between non-Jewish Germans in the two countries.

This article explores Allied intelligence officers’ encounters with and interrogations of German civilians from autumn 1944 onwards, psychological warfare operations directed at civilians, and their wider ramifications. Focusing especially on the officers serving with the Psychological Warfare Division (PWD), I will demonstrate that field intelligence officers’ stance towards German civilians was fluid and often ambiguous, with the encounter causing considerable distress to some of them. Their reports and correspondence further suggest that in this period, Germans readily professed knowledge of atrocities. But contrary to intelligence officers’ expectations, they failed to accept any guilt or responsibility. Finally, I will argue that the very foundations and techniques of Western Allied psychological warfare may have reinforced and legitimised justification strategies that separated between “real” Nazis and everyone else. This was at odds with one of the central aims of Military Government, i.e. to inculcate a sense of culpability in Germans.

Does homecoming epitomize Polish filmmaker Pawel Pawlikowski's last two films, Ida (2013) and Cold War (Zimna wojna, 2018)? Considering the box office, the awards won, and the film critics’ response, it seems that the transition from documentaries to feature films meant a turn to Polish history and identity for the director. (Pawlikowski was born in Warsaw but has spent most of his life abroad after his parents left Poland in the wake of the anti-Zionist campaign of March 1968, while he was still a teenager.) As Jerry White put it, analyzing Cold War in the light of Pawlikowski's earlier career as a British filmmaker interested in non-Polish themes, his last two films have put “Polish cinema back into global spotlight.” The question arises whether Pawlikowski's recent films gained worldwide success—in fact, they were more successful abroad than in Poland itself—because of the vision of Poland they convey, rather than a “Polish vision” of postwar European history and identity. This article examines several the major themes of Pawlikowski's films and compares them with the work of other acclaimed Polish directors, especially one of Krzysztof Kieslowski's later films, The Double Life of Véronique (La double vie de Véronique, 1991).

Historians of East Germany often see the state as future-looking, but questions remain about the kinds of futures that East Germans expected. Youth space education provides one example of how East Germans thought about the future. Across the country, spaceflight formed an important part of youth education through books, the Jugendweihe, and places like cosmonaut clubs. Although these activities show how East German adults taught children about space travel, they also illuminate expectations for the future of spaceflight and the future of East Germany's children. In a state that continually proclaimed the imminent future of everyday spaceflight, East German adults, even party members, adopted a particular vision of the future. They taught children that the ideas of space travel would be important for their lives on Earth, while simultaneously questioning the state's optimistic vision for everyday spaceflight.

After 1945 both German states overturned longstanding laws and policies from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that designated women as second-class citizens in spousal rights, parental authority and marital property. From the early postwar years, female politicians and activists in the women's movement pursued in both Germanys reforms of the obsolete marriage and family law. The article compares how these women and mainly male legislators in both states envisioned the role of women in the family and in gender relations. It shows that these debates in the FRG and the GDR were influenced on the one hand by earlier, pre-1933 ideas, and on the other hand reacted to Nazi-era politics. Yet, because of their different political, economic and social conditions, discourses and policies developed in the context of the Cold War in both states in different directions, though they continued to be related to each other.

In the second half of the 1950s, American films about “delinquent youth” took West Germany by storm. Although these films were not screened in East Germany, the still open border between the FRG and GDR allowed young people in both states to see these films. Many adopted American clothing styles and music in both Germanys. Two films, the West German production Die Halbstarken (1956) and the East German production Berlin–Ecke Schönhauser (1957) addressed “delinquent youth” in the German context and became quite popular. The article compares the competing images of femininity in both films, which linked the problem of “delinquent youth” to consumerism, pop culture, and “weak parents,” but portrayed young women very differently. While consumerism in the West German film was in a gender-specific way linked to femininity, the East German film linked consumerism to a class society and displaced it to the West. Contemporary film reviews and press treatment of main actresses reflected these differing attitudes toward gender and consumption.

This contribution explains how a specific constellation of Swiss consulting experts, financial advisors, and diplomats became involved in the economic restructuring of eastern Germany after November 1989. Swiss engagements reveal that capital did not merely “flow” across unifying Germany's borders, as economists’ definitions of foreign direct investment suggest. Rather, facilitators within and especially beyond Germany actively promoted investments. Business involving foreigners was often grounded in socialist-era trade activities that united profit seekers from East and West Germany, Switzerland, and other nations. As foreign engagements in unifying Germany's economy illustrate, mediators mattered. Pasts persisted. Debt and investment were intertwined. The course of public divesture and state-sponsored private investment in post-Wall Germany suggests future scholars pay closer attention to individuals and entities engaged in exchanging market information, not so much within individual nations as between them.

Yair Mintzker's book on Jew Süss raises a series of provocative questions about German history and history itself, which this forum aims to address. Specifically, it presents four reflections on Mintzker's book that cover the following range of topics: Jay Howard Geller situates Mintzker's work within the historiography on Jewish biographies and antisemitic trials; Sarah Maza explores whether Mintzker pursues the venerable task of getting to the “truth” of who Joseph Oppeinhemer was, despite his claims to the contrary; Jesse Spohnholz considers Mintzker's book as a model of microhistory; and my essay takes a broader approach by confronting the central issue of self-interest in history.

In her book that explores Turkish migrant organizations in Germany, sociologist Gökçe Yurdakul detects a historical transformation in the political representation of migrants and minorities from the 1970s through the 2000s. She marks six historical events that lead to this transformation: labor migration (1961–1972), the introduction of family reunification law (1973–1979), post-1980 military coup asylum seekers from Turkey (1980–1988), the fall of the Berlin Wall and its aftermath of exacerbating xenophobia against non-German minorities (1989–1998), the introduction of the new citizenship law (1999), and finally the terrorist attacks on September 11 (2001–present). According to Yurdakul, these events mark a gradual shift in the minority rights debate. While the first minority organizations were formed around labor rights, gradually, due to these landmark events and laws, their demands shifted toward political and social rights of citizenship, and identitarian rights, such as the right “to exist as Muslims and as Europeans.”