Divided Subjects, Invisible Borders: Re-Unified Germany After 1989
326
Divided Subjects, Invisible Borders: Re-Unified Germany After 1989
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Overview
The old identities of East and West, which all but dissolved in joyous embraces as the Berlin Wall fell, emerged once more after formal re-unification a year later in 1990. 2015 marks the twenty-fifth anniversary of that German re-unification. Yet Germany remains divided; a mutual distrust lingers, and national history remains contentious.
The material, social, cultural and psychic effects of re-unification on the lives of eastern and western Germans since 1989 all demand again asking fundamental questions about history, social change and ideology. Divided Subjects, Invisible Borders puts affective life at the centre of these questions, both in the role affect played in mobilizing East Germans to overthrow their regime and as a sign of disappointment after formal reunification. Using contemporary Germany as a lens the book explores broader debates about borders, memory and subjectivity.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781783482436 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc. |
| Publication date: | 09/21/2015 |
| Series: | Place, Memory, Affect |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 326 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Divided Subjects, Invisible Borders
Re-Unified Germany After 1989
By Ben Gook
Rowman & Littlefield International, Ltd.
Copyright © 2015 Ben GookAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-78348-243-6
CHAPTER 1
End of Story
Nachträglichkeit and the German Past
East Germans protested against their state in late 1989; East and West Germany became one again in 1990. No longer Ost und Westdeutschland, but Deutschland. And, for roughly twenty-five years since, we have had this single entity. What could be simpler than this? There seems to be little in dispute and few footholds for re-exploring the history of Germany after 1989. Common sense dictates that this is how things stand today; yet, if we move in reverse from 2014 to 1989, we can notice the belated hardening into 'fate' of what was earlier an open moment — a moment at which contingency was visible. As we move backwards (2014, 2013, 2012 ... 1991, 1990, 1989), the range of possible futures increases at each point. The present ending has circumscribed what the past offers through a narrative that excludes what 'failed' in history. This is common enough: 'Every past event, along with its belated understanding, comprises a site of multiple possible readings, each one capable of transforming our horizon of understanding and eliciting in its turn another potential shock of understanding'. Given this multiplicity of readings and our anxiety in the face of the unknown, we seek out certainty — namely, the fiction that what we have is necessary, given our past. Hence, the everyday experience of history as linear narrative is an illusion — a necessary illusion — that 'masks the fact that it is the ending that retroactively confers the consistency of an organic whole on the preceding events'. A history always emerges, but it can be — will be — contested.
WIR WAREN DAS VOLK
The 'backwards' approach yields, in this German case, an idea of the revolution's narrowing meaning; the way East German voices grow harder to hear as revolution becomes re-unification becomes Germany today; the way an East-West openness forecloses on a mutual suspicion and an ongoing distinction in East-West identity. East Germans disappear as political subjects in re-unified Germany through a process of forgetting and reinterpretation of the past. I contend that four terms arrange the historical account of the GDR and its end, moving to close off the varieties of historical experience and operating as a 'frame' for historical narration: (i) Mauerfall and (ii) Wende as symbolizations of the revolutionary sequence (often compressed into a singular '1989'), which later became (iii) 're-unification' (a different stage and quite distinct), and also the colloquial (and derogatory but increasingly 'reclaimed') terminology of the (iv) Ossi as a distinctive figure of East Germanness, which emerges after 1989 alongside its West counterpart (Wessi). These signifiers arrange historical experience. They exhibit what we might call the power of naming — what Freud recognized as the power of narration and naming to dissipate the traumatic potential of events (or objects) — or 'the word kills the thing'. But this death is only superficial; the thing, the event, the moment lives on in another scene. If we scan the chain of signifiers, we find breaks, or aporiai, where another history can be seen — where that history breaks through the self-satisfied babble of the present. That will be this book's task, but, for now, let's look at these terms.
Mauerfall
The revolutionary events of 1989, which came to a head on 9 November with the Mauerfall have been narrated in various ways. Most view the revolution itself as the grind of protest and dissatisfaction, a slow leaking of resentment and annoyance with no obvious resolution at its outset. The endgame of GDR revolution was not the sudden and bloody uprising of other nations, such as Romania. Regular protests or prayer meetings in Leipzig and other cities, flight of GDR subjects through Hungary and a growing desire for reform of various GDR policies, not least travel restrictions; these are the well-known circumstances precipitating the revolution and the GDR's end, and they have been the focus of many historical accounts. Charles Maier, for instance, argues that the ultimate top-down decision in 1989 is the one taken against stemming the protests with police or military force. This has been an influential argument, but the debate remains open, with recent books (lesser 'Cold War historiography' aside) adding new insights to Maier's interpretation. Given the effects of historiography on the present, this is more than mere historiographic table tennis between scholars. The stakes of the Mauerfall will become clear as the book proceeds and will become a focus of discussion in part IV when we look at commemorative events, where these interpretations find their way into the public sphere.
Wende
The period that followed the revolution and Mauerfall is signified by the German term Wende. This German noun has carried over into English language study of the late GDR to signify the interregnum prior to re-unification. Wende is not a 1989 neologism, but rather a common word — in German, it means change, rebound, reversal or turn. It means, then, a change in direction — and, in a historical irony, it often means turning around after coming up against a barrier, as in a swimming pool. Its use for historic eras was not unprecedented. It had currency in the years after 1945 and 1968 — the so-called Wendezeiten (turnaround eras) or Wendepunkte (turning points). Worth noting too is its sense during the West German Historians' Dispute of the mid-1980s, where it signified a comeback of conservative ideas about German history.
Since 1989, die Wende has eclipsed its earlier uses and become attached to the GDR upheaval. The West German magazine Der Spiegel perhaps ushered it into popularity on 16 October 1989 through the term's appearance on its cover. Two days later, it was used in a speech in East Germany by Egon Krenz, short-lived leader of the late GDR. Krenz, who took over as SED General Secretary from Erich Honecker, used it to designate the mood of this brief and heady period around the Mauerfall. In its general usage today, however, Wende dates roughly from before the Mauerfall to institutional re-unification in October 1990. Wende has come to signify, then, this uncertain period between the GDR as it had been and the re-unified Germany to come. Nevertheless, competing interpretations emerged. One official version celebrates the Wende as a political turnaround, wherein GDR citizens overthrew the (post-)Stalinist ruling party and state in the name of capitalism and re-unification. Another version depicts the period as a catastrophe, deploring equally the failure of the revolution to live up to its promise as well as the capitalist restoration it heralded. This second version has been prevalent in leftist and intellectual discourses. These two versions — one joyous, one rueful — have polarized collective memory. We will see the tension between these two interpretations play out at various moments in this book.
These positions can be complicated by inserting everyday eastern German voices, which are largely missing from these two western German and intellectual discourses. What we find is an expression of the Wende as a period of release and unimagined novelty. Wende is understood as a German event with neither a historic nor a linguistic equivalent in other countries. No other signifier is apparently adequate to the task of representing this moment: 'The Wende was not the kind of event that can easily be put into words'. Dominic Boyer recounts the following from his fieldwork after re-unification:
Many responses to questions such as 'What was the Wende like?' began with 'How can I describe it to you?' and then trailed off through minutes of searching for apt metaphors and similes, false starts, agitated silences, and sighs. One man simply laughed at me and said, 'Herr Boyer, I would be very happy to explain it to you, but the problem is, we're not even certain ourselves what it is that happened to us'.
There is much to be made of this, particularly in a Lacanian understanding of what the limits of language, the edges of the sayable, represent, as well as in Lacan's impatience with the idea of the ineffable. What are these gaps, and what do they mean? What is being repressed or overlooked in those false starts and silences? Ossis cannot find the words because they are describing something improper, something beyond the limits of what is licensed by the predominant ideology. The gaps signify an otherwise forbidden enjoyment for the GDR subject, an enjoyment which propriety then forbids giving voice. The perverse injunction — what the law points to in order to forbid — in the GDR was the demand to attempt an escape, to breach the border. Boyer notes his eastern interlocutors, for all their exasperation, take joy from the effort required to communicate — again and again — this event. Our stories halt at the point we touch the real, when we 'cannot find the words', doing so in a way that we always come back to it without articulating it. 'The subject in himself', Lacan writes, 'the recalling of his biography, all this goes only to a certain limit, which is known as the real'. The real is disorienting but also the place of fullness, where nothing is lacking. As the various Ossi anecdotes in this book attest, experiences of the real act as magnets for our desire of freedom, a fount of possibility and a void at the centre of subjects and their societies. Broadly, authoritative narratives and interpretations, such as orthodox historical accounts, move to displace contingency and paper over the void, foreclosing experiences and possibilities. Subjectively, memory and symbolization (naming the event, killing the thing) attempt to achieve consistency, a story fashioned to escape this traumatic real. Like eastern Germans, we will return to the Wende throughout this book because it figures as one of the vital moments in relations between East and West Germans. Its singularity plays a significant role in the way eastern Germans orient themselves to re-unified Germany.
Re-Unification
We might consider re-unification a project, one perhaps to remain unfinished for as long as the forty years of the country's postwar division. The sober rationality of re-unification as a term 'scarcely convey[s] the contentious and improvisational character of the actual transition process'. While progress — meaning nationwide justice and equality — in re-unification is undeniable, remainders and reminders of East-West differences commonly irrupt in Germany today. These reminders are apparent because 're-unification' signifies (at least) two notionally separate processes of bringing together East and West: (1) government policies, laws or institutional arrangements; and (2) the meeting of citizens in the lifeworld of re-unified Germany.
To speak of the institutional processes first, re-unification was swift, if not expedient. Formally occurring in October 1990, it took place far quicker than even Helmut Kohl, then-leader of West Germany, had envisaged in his Ten Point Plan of late November 1989.One of the first and crucial decisions concerned the constitution. This seems obscure and legalistic, yet it had wide-ranging ramifications for how German re-unification proceeded, as well as perception of that process. Initially, there had been talk of two confederated states to be brought into a single, enlarged Germany. The GDR Round Table, one of the Wende mechanisms to reform the socialist state, voted in February 1990 to reject wholesale incorporation into West Germany. So the first substantive business in the Round Table's meetings was to set up a 'working group' to draft a new GDR constitution — a clear sign of an intention to reform rather than unify. Many of the resulting documents' provisions challenged western German legal thought by promising to protect rights to work, housing and education, granting special status to civic groups, and pronouncing 'state goals', such as humane treatment of animals and environmental protection. But after a popular vote for re-unification, this new constitution was irrelevant at the national level for two reasons — first, the GDR no longer existed by October of that year, and second, the way Kohl chose to proceed with re-unification meant no new constitution was drafted, as the West German Basic Law (Grundgesetz) would carry over into the new republic.
Kohl had two constitutional options for effecting national re-unification: Article 23 or Article 146 of the West German Basic Law. Article 23 declares all German states to be covered by the Basic Law at its inception in 1949. It provides that 'in other parts of Germany it shall be put into force on their accession'. In contrast, Article 146 states that 'this Basic Law shall cease to be in force on the day on which a constitution adopted by a free decision of the German people comes into force'. Unexpectedly, Kohl unified the two nations under Article 23 rather than Article 146. By implication, Article 23 'extended' West German economic, political, social and legal standards to the 'new federal states' in eastern Germany without allowing, as Article 146 intended, for the drafting of a new constitution. Kohl's Article 23 use was controversial. Given its language of 'accession', some saw it as akin to a colonial act — taking over the lands to the east and remaking them in the west's image with no opportunity for East German input into the legal foundations of the new Federal Republic. The Allies originally imposed the West German constitution in the wake of 1945 — an imposition implied by the reference in Article 146 to a future constitution chosen democratically, by 'free decision'— and it reflected, more broadly, a postwar Western European anxiety around popular sovereignty. Indeed, Theodor Heuss, the inaugural president of the postwar republic, ensured that the Basic Law was not put to a popular vote. From these anxious beginnings, jurists and politicians amended, altered and corrected the Basic Law to fit West German purposes as the country grew. A bric-a-brac document, the Basic Law effectively became a permanent temporary measure. A decade after formal re-unification, Markovits summarized the changes as the result of the fact that 'West German savvy, might, and self-promotion controlled the legislative remaking of united Germany and turned what should have been a brotherly reunion into an "Anschluß" in which the former GDR was swallowed, statutory body and jurisprudential soul, by its more powerful and greedy sibling'. Again, a longer history echoes through re-unification; the resonant WWII symbolism of Anschluß is noteworthy. Although not a panacea, a new and democratically legitimate constitution could have soothed the eastern German sense that western Germans were annexing, if not colonizing, the east.
Not only was this accession cemented into the institutional makeup of re-unified Germany, but it also flowed into interpersonal relations between eastern and western Germans. Re-unification was an all-encompassing national drama, central to political activity and discourse since the Mauerfall, and so its contours, moulded by Kohl and other West German elites, have come to shape both institutional makeup and everyday life. Hence, as Andreas Glaeser argues, the 'organisational form of German unification has become the predominant root metaphor'. The root metaphor licenses a whole series of characterizations: 'The main characteristic ... is the identification of western persons, things and ways as models to which eastern persons, things and ways should conform'. Re-unification 'is thus identified as a unilateral process of assimilation through which easterners are helped to raise themselves to western standards'. The identifications and positions which eastern subjects are compelled to take up or occupy within the (barely) remade western German formation, then, mean that eastern German encounters with once Western but now pan-German institutions repeatedly dramatize that moment of accession. In other words, a series of adjustments have been made in thought, action and orientation, but all in one direction and on the model of the constitutional accession.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Divided Subjects, Invisible Borders by Ben Gook. Copyright © 2015 Ben Gook. Excerpted by permission of Rowman & Littlefield International, Ltd..
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