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Who Are We? Who Are We Supposed to Be?

Thinking About Current Identification Processes Among East Germans

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 February 2024

Matthias Middell
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There is no shortage of analyses, even of mutually exclusive ones, concerning the identities of the East Germans. Social scientists as well as journalists find enticing the phenomenon of a society that is in the midst of a transformation; a society that experiences the (national) unification between a part of society that is revolutionary with another part that is geographically separate and non-revolutionary while undergoing a process of social blending. This examination is accompanied by constant exhortations from the politicians - who, as if appealing to themselves, have the task of representing German unity in nationally conceived institutions - to surmount the mental trenches that have arisen. This article tries to discuss some aspects of the processes of identification that are either unfolding in East Germany or are failing to materialize. In this connection we are concerned with interpretations of social and political transformations on the part of the individual, but also with the “impositions of the Western paradigm,” both of which generate norms of behavior and language through which the East Germans must find their own language when describing their situation.

Type
Research Article
Information
Diogenes , Volume 44 , Issue 173 , January 1996 , pp. 55 - 72
Copyright
Copyright © 1996 Fédération Internationale des Sociétés de Philosophie / International Federation of Philosophical Societies (FISP)

References

Notes

1. A recent bibliography listed more than 720 projects; to these must added an even larger number of specialized studies that are part of a program to promote scholarship under the heading of “transformation research.” No national news paper or journal misses the opportunity, week after week, to offer items con cerned with the Germans' growing-together and its difficulties. Is this proof of a growing interest or an indication of a deep-seated insecurity? Claus Offe, now professor of Politial Science at Berlin's Humboldt University, suspects that West ern societies are fundamentally incapable “of offering effective assistance even to the attempt at copying” by other countries“. It seems that we are dealing with the attempt systematically to copy another building whose blueprint has been lost.” Quoted in: W. Engler (ed.), Die ungewollte Moderne, Frankfurt, 1995, p. 60.

2. E. François, “L'unité dans la diversité,” in: G. Casasus, S. Lemasson and S. Lor rain (eds.), L'autre Allemagne, 1990-1995. L'unification au quotidien, Paris, 1995, pp. 33-40.

3. Ibid., p. 40.

4. A good survey of the debate on identity in the humanities is to be found in: O. Marquard and K. Stierle (eds.), Identität, Munich 1979. For references to recent directions in cultural studies, sociology and social psychology see, e.g., M. Kohl and G. Robert, Biografie und soziale Wirklichkeit, Stuttgart 1984; H. Bilden and H. Keupp (eds.), Verunsicherungen. Das Subjekt im gesellschaftlichen Wandel, Göttin gen 1989; I. Mörth and G. Fröhlich (eds.), Das symbiotische Kapital der Lebensstile. Zur Kultursoziologie der Moderne nach Pierre Bourdieu, Frankfurt-New York, 1994.

5. J.-P. Sartre, L'être et le néant, Paris, 1943, p. 159.

6. L. Clausen and C. Schlüter (eds.), Hundert Jahre “Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft”, Opladen, 1991, with a summary of the current social-political debate that Ferdi nand Tönnies had first raised in his juxtaposition of these two concepts. See also G. Vobruba, Gemeinschaft ohne Moral. Theorie und Empirie moralfreier Gemein schafts-Konstruktionen, Vienna, 1994, with additional relevant literature.

7. This aspect is being covered in several contributions to: M. Middell (ed.), Welt-system und Globalgeschichte, Leipzig, 1994 (Comparativ, vol. II, No. 5 [1994]).

8. I. Wallerstein, The World System, 3 vols., New York, 1974,1980,1989.

9. M. Geyer, “Industriepolitik in der DDR. Von grossindustrieller Nostalgie zum Zusammenbruch,” in: J. Kocka and M. Sabrow (eds.), Die DDR als Geschichte. Fragen-Hypothesen-Perspektiven, Berlin 1995, p. 132.

10. According to retrospective statements by leading figures such as Portugalov and Falin, the German Department of the USSR's Central Committee had for some time, though never persistently, viewed the GDR as an “unnatural” con sequence of a division of Germany that would not last forever.

11. See M. Kossok (ed.), Revolutionen der Neuzeit, 1500-1917, Berlin, 1982; C. Tilly, Die europäischen Revolutionen, Munich, 1993.

12. M. Geyer (note 9 above), pp. 133f.

13. U. Beck and E. Beck-Gernsheim (eds.), Riskante Freiheiten. Individualisierung in modernen Gesellschaften, Frankfurt, 1994, pp. 11ff.

14. R. Reich, The Work of Nations, New York 1992, pp. 294ff.

15. From a critical perspective, see the contributions to: W. Fach and F. Geissler (eds.), Standort-Argumente, Leipzig, 1995.

16. See E. François, “Nation retrouvée, ‘nation contre-coeur:' l'Allemagne des com mémorations,” in: Le Débat, No. 78 (1994), pp. 62-70; idem, H. Siegrist, and J. Vogel (eds.), Nation und Emotion. Deutschland und Frankreich im Vergleich, 19. und 20. Jahrhundert, Göttingen, 1995.

17. For summaries see R.J. Evans, In Hitlers Shadow, New York, 1988; C.S. Maier, The Unmasterable Past, Cambridge, Mass., 1988.

18. W. Engler (note 1 above), p. 162.

19. See, e.g., K. Weissmann, Rückruf in die Geschichte. Die deutsche Herausforderung: Alte Gefahren - Neue Chancen, Berlin-Frankfurt, 1992; R. Zitelmann, Adenauers Gegner. Streiter fiir die Einheit, Erlangen 1991; R. Zitelmann, K. Weissmann, and M. Grossheim (eds.), Chancen und Risiken für Deutschland, Berlin-Frankfurt, 1993; A. Baring, Deutschland, was nun?, Berlin 1991

20. This hypothesis pervades A. Mitter and S. Wolle, Untergang auf Raten. Unbek annte Kapitel der DDR-Geschichte, Munich 1994. For a debate on this notion that constructs the inexorable collapse of the GDR's development and leaves no room for alternative possibilities see the panel discussion about the place of the 1953 uprising in: J. Kocka and M. Sabrow (eds.) (note 9 above).

21. The charge that hypotheses concerning the character of the GDR have precisely such implications is therefore being refuted as an unjustified conspiracy theory. Thus quite explicitly with reference to the dispute over the Potsdam Institute for Research on Contemporary German History: A. Mitter and S. Wolle, “Der Biele felder Weg. Die Vergangenheitsbewältigung der Historiker und die Vereinigung der Funktionäre,” in: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 10 August 1993, p. 23.

22. See the 15,187-page minutes and the final report of the Bundestag enquête com mission, entitled “Aufarbeitung von Geschichte und Folgen der SED-Diktatur in Deutschland.” Here the history of the East Germans, in so far as it does not touch upon the central concern of “satisfation for the victims,” is reduced to a brief and generalized moral value judgment: a condemnation of the SED dicta torship does not imply a condemnation of the men and women subjected to it; “on the contrary, the Germans in the Soviet Zone/GDR have had to bear the more onerous part of Germany's postwar history.”

23. For a detailed discussion in comparative perspective see: E. François, M. Mid dell, E. Terray, and D. Wierling (eds.), 1968 als europäisches Jahr, Leipzig, 1996.

24. Thus the results of an empirical study on Leipzig adolescents of both sexes between the ages of 17 and 21 in: T. Ahbe, Transformation — Identität — Ressourcen, Leipzig 1996 (Comparativ, No. 6).