THERE IS NO CONSENSUS in Germany on how the events of 1989/1990 should be remembered and commemorated. Indeed, as the historian Martin Sabrow has suggested, the entire GDR constitutes a “battleground of memories” (Kampfplatz der Erinnerungen) that continually produces an “ongoing public conflict” (öffentlicher Dauerkonflikt). Although a central memorial to the events of 1989/1990 is likely to be opened in Berlin by the end of 2023, the process of deciding on the details of the memorial took up more than two decades of back-and-forth arguments and stalling. The long and involved evolution of the memorial revealed at least as much about national disunity as about unity. Furthermore, the proposed federal memorial to 1989/1990 in Leipzig, site of the decisive anti-government demonstration on October 9, 1989, is currently stalled. Indeed, it seems likely that a federal memorial to the events of 1989/1990 in Leipzig may never be built at all.

Germans have thus far exhibited considerable disagreement on the need for a central memorial to the events of 1989/1990 as well as on the question of what might be the appropriate venue for such a memorial. In addition, citizens have passionately disputed exactly what, if anything, should be commemorated in a memorial to the events of 1989/1990. Ironically, in spite of all good intentions on the part of memorial organizers, the effort to create a central national memorial to the events of 1989/1990—in other words, to German unification itself—has revealed above all a notable lack of national unity and consensus. This casts doubt on Hope Harrison's contention that, over the course of the past few decades, something like a master narrative in German memory culture of 1989/1990—a “new founding myth” for the nation, as she calls it—has evolved. While there can be little doubt that efforts to cement such a master narrative are underway, it is by no means clear that such efforts have succeeded. Contemporary German memory culture of 1989/1990 is in fact remarkably local and regional. As the historian Jon Berndt Olsen has shown, there is “enormous diversity […] in vernacular memory regarding how the concepts of freedom and unity should be represented in the German context.”