I WANT TO TELL THE STORY of how I came to discover East Germany and to commit my professional life to the study of its culture. So this is an intellectual autobiography of sorts, not one that I claim to be representative but nonetheless one that might contribute to narrating the “story” of the German Democratic Republic (GDR), a state that has disappeared from the map, and one that also might reveal the challenges we face in making sense of postwar German history. It is not the first time I look back at the GDR; at the last count this seems to be the sixth time in the past twenty-five years that I am stepping back and assessing where we stand vis-à-vis what seems to be a closed book, whose tattered cover I keep reopening. This repeated, perhaps even obsessive approach to the past has less to do with history than it does with the present, that is, how we see things now, retrospectively, at any given point in time. Thus I want to engage here in that double process of memory work: remembering and forgetting. For me to (re)construct the schemes and patterns that describe the changes, in particular the before and after of November 9, 1989, as I see them now, I need to locate myself, at the same time being aware that in order to tell a compelling story, I tend to erase the contingent and discontinuous quality of the past. So with this awareness, let me begin by reflecting on the GDR, which is situated for me somewhere between proximity and distance: at one and the same time too near and too far.

The story begins in late November 1989, when I received an airmail postcard from my dissertation advisor, who out of the blue wrote to ask what I thought about the collapse of the Berlin Wall and whether I would be changing careers as a result.