The GDR Tomorrow

Elizabeth Emery, Matthew Hines, and Evelyn Preuss

Introduction: The GDR Tomorrow

bin ich schon zu früh hier

oder bin ich schon zu spät

– Gerhard Gundermann¹

Wenn man den Osten als soziales Experiment betrachtet, eine gerechtere Welt zu schaffen, dann ist das ja gar kein schlechtes Ziel,

und zumal gemessen an der Welt, in der wir jetzt leben,

ein Ziel, das durchaus sinnvoll erscheint.

Also wäre es nur konsequent zu fragen: Warum hat das nicht geklappt?

Oder ist die Idee verkehrt?

Wenn man aber zu dem Ergebnis kommt, dass die Idee so falsch ist,

dann wäre ein bisschen Analyse ganz interessant,

auch um für heute etwas zu lernen.

– Andreas Dresen²

Die DDR in mir ist nicht einfach verschwunden, nur weil das Land nicht mehr existiert.

Was mich durch sie immer noch bestimmt, ist die Abwesenheit von Selbstverständlichkeit.

– Claudia Rusch³

The GDR Tomorrow seems an oxymoron. The German Democratic Republic formally dissolved more than thirty years ago, yet its memory is vivid in the post-1990 FRG with new museum openings and new scholarship written, and its echoes resonating in cultural production loudly and clearly. If the fall of the Berlin Wall signifies the end of a failed experiment, it should provide closure. Yet we continue to replay it, as if something were still open – to debate, to explore, and to question. In November 1989, western journalists asked the East German comedian Peter Ensikat whether the fall of the Wall would mean the end of socialism. Suggesting that the opening of the East German border entailed the end of socialism, the question already represented a perspective on the GDR that came to determine western discourse for the following decades. Indeed, the fall of the Wall for many seemed to signal the end of history altogether.

Francis Fukuyama’s celebration of the liberal democracies and their free-market capitalism as The End of History came to encapsulate the neoliberal doctrine of ‘no alternative’, which, according to Philip Ther, not only put an end to discussions about alternative political options, but also generated a pessimistic outlook of lower wages and social spending cuts in one country after the next.⁴ Timothy Snyder describes ideologies that manipulate constituents with ‘a sense that the future is just more of the present, that the laws of progress are known, that there are no alternatives, and therefore nothing really to be done’ as ‘the politics of inevitability’ and ‘politics of eternity’.⁵ In the latter, ‘time is no longer a line into the future, but a circle that endlessly returns the same threats’ in a life without agency.⁶

In response to the journalists’ questions, however, Ensikat offered a different interpretation of the fall of the Wall, and answered: “Jetzt fängt vielleicht der Sozialismus überhaupt erst an, ein Sozialismus zu werden” [socialism is perhaps only now starting to become socialism].⁷ Setting past and future into correspondence as he read the opening of the Wall as a new rather than a lost opportunity, Ensikat captured the original impetus of the 1989 revolution, whose proponents had in many cases sought to democratize socialism rather than abandon it. Daniela Dahn, for example, refers to events in autumn 1989 as a ‘déjà vu’ because the roots of the protest movement, she argues, could be found in the GDR’s own antifascist impetus, which lent the populace a ‘verinnerlichte Zivilcourage’ [internalized civil courage].⁸ While the GDR no longer exists as a state, the dimensions of its political project and their implications for our own future draw public and scholarly attention to its legacy.

In stark contrast to the ‘no alternative’ neoliberal ideology, the GDR’s promise of utopia constantly trained the focus on the time yet to come as a space in which alternatives could unfold. This future vision was designed to remedy and replace a cataclysmic past, hence its political discourse suspended the GDR between the legacy of the past and a utopian future in which the ‘Aufbau des Sozialismus’ [construction of socialism] would be achieved. The East German national anthem summarizes the temporal tensions that came to characterize political discourse in the opening line ‘Auferstanden aus Ruinen und der Zukunft zugewandt’ [resurrected from ruins and oriented to the future]. These temporal tightropes are not confined to state ideology but also characterize much of East German culture, especially in its most thoughtful and subversive moments, such as Christa Wolf’s quotation of William Faulkner in her novel Kindheitsmuster [Patterns of Childhood]: “Das Vergangene ist nicht tot; es ist nicht einmal vergangen. Wir trennen es von uns ab und stellen uns fremd” [The past is not dead; it is not even past. We separate it from ourselves and pretend it is foreign].⁹ Today, one might view the demise of the GDR as the reopening of its utopian visions, flinging history wide open once again to resist the conception of the future as without alternative.