Website:
http://www.lsa.umich.edu/german/gs-n-effect.html
On December 2 - 4, the German Department at the University of Michigan, Ann
Arbor will host a conference on
The Unification
Effect: The Berlin Republic Ten Years After
What effect did the events of 1989 have on German cultural and historical
discourse? How have we come to make sense of these events during the last
decade? Ten yars after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the German Department
at the University of Michigan has brought together an international and
interdisciplinary group of scholars to explore these questions in a
conference on The Unification Effect. Speakers will address the
construction of "1989" as an event, as well as its supposed lessons for the
ways in which we now write German history. They will explore how German
unification has effected a set of significant reconfigurations in the
culture of memory, in media culture, and in the role of culture itself over
the past ten years.
All events are free and open to the public.
CONFERENCE SCHEDULE
Location: University of Michigan, International Institute, room 1636.
Thursday, December 2
10:00 AM-4:00 PM | GRADUATE STUDENT WORKSHOP
"The Unification Effect"
Rackham Graduate School, West Conference Room
7:00 PM | FILM SCREENING
The Promise (Margarete von Trotta and Peter Schneider). The Film will
be introduced by Johannes von Motlke.
Michigan Theater, 603 E. Liberty
Friday, December 3
9:00-9:30 AM | OPENING REMARKS
Michael Kennedy (Director, International Insitute), Fred Amrine (Chair, German
Studies), and Julia Hell
9:30 AM-12:00 PM | THE RHETORICS OF HISTORY
Chair: Geoff Eley, University of Michigan
Alf Luedtke (Max-Planck-Institut für Geschichte, Göttingen): "Victory
and Defeat - or, Multiple Normalities? Competing Hindsights on the History
of the Two Germanies, 1945-89".
Marcia Klotz (University of California, Irvine): "Colonial Legacies, Germany,
and the New Global Order".
Ulrich Baer (New York University): "Restitution and Forgiveness in Germany
after 1989".
Commentator: Moishe Postone, University of Chicago
1:30-4:30 PM | CULTURES OF MEMORY
Chair: Helmut Puff, University of Michigan
Daphne Berdahl (University of Minnesota): "'Ostalgie' and the Politics of
Significance".
Andreas Ludwig (Director, Dokumentationszentrum Alltagskultur der DDR,
Eisenhüttenstadt): "Discursive Logics in the Material Representation
of East German History."
Birgit Dahlke (Humboldt University): "'Kontemplationslager SBZ'. GDR
Childhood Narratives in the 1990s—Texts by Young East German Authors".
Commentator: Andy Markovits, University of Michigan
8:00 PM | FILM SCREENING
Persistence (Daniel Eisenberg, 1997) The director will be present to
introduce his film.
Angell Hall, Auditorium D
Saturday, December 4
9:00 AM-12:00 PM | MEDIA IMAGES OF GERMAN HISTORY
Chair: Kerstin Barndt, University of Michigan
Eggo Müller (Hochschule für Film und Fernsehen, Potsdam): "Revised
Memories: German Television's Representation of '10Years After'".
Sabine Wilke (University of Washington): "History as Fictional Construct:
The Staging of Documentary Material in Margarete von Trotta's Das
Versprechen (The Promise)".
Commentator: Katie Trumpener, University of Chicago
1:30-4:30 PM | RECONFIGURING THE CULTURAL SPHERE
Chair: George Steinmetz, University of Michigan
Eric Rentschler (Harvard University): "New German Levity".
Kaspar Maase (University of Tübingen): "A Republic of Provincials? -
National Culture and Regional Identities in Unified Germany".
Irit Rogoff (Goldsmiths College, London): "Spaces of Disavowal".
Y. Michal Bodemann, University of Toronto
Bubis and Walser: Jewish Revival and the Politics of Recognition
Commentator: David Levin, University of Chicago
Saturday Evening: Dinner and Party
SPEAKERS
Ulrich Baer - "Restitution and Forgiveness in Germany after 1989."
Professor Baer will discuss how the discourses of forgiveness and various
acts of Wiedergutmachung, which have so strongly informed Germany's
post-war identity have changed after 1989. Specifically, he will consider
what is means for West Germany - as a nation that has been waiting for decades
to be granted forgiveness - to have assumed the role of forgiving the unjust
leadership of the former East German regime. He will ask how the procedures
and symbolic gestures of material resitution, legal pardoning and moral
forgiveness may help the new Germany in constituting its post-war identity,
and to what extent these acts and gestures are repetitions of the gestures
that had granted the two Germanies their distinct identities after the war.
Daphne Berdahl - "Ostalgie" and the Politics of Significance.
The last several years have witnessed the proliferation of nostalgic practices
and narratives as well as the birth and boom of a nostalgia industry in the
former GDR. Often grouped together under the label "Ostalgie", such practices
are frequently dismissed in public discourses as "mere" nostalgia and
distinguished from "historical" or "authentic" commemorative efforts. In
this paper I interrogate the politics of this distinction by examining discourses
about Ostalgie Narratives about the former East Germany and discussions of
nostalgic practices and longings, I argue, reflect and constitute ongoing
struggles over the control and appropriation of historical memory in united
Germany.
Birgit Dahlke - "Kontemplationslager SBZ." GDR Childhood Narratives in the
90s—Texts from Young East German Authors.
In the pose and poetry of authors Bert Papenfuss, Kerstin Hensel, Christoph
Brumme, Annett Groeschner, and Barbara Koehler among others, Birgit Dahlke
examines stories of childhood memories of the GDR for their differing and
opposing attitudes. A certain defiant adherence to normalness and everydayness
characterizes all narrative strategies, which are set against the ideologically
charged German-German Ostalgie discourse.
Marcia Klotz - "Colonial Legacies, Germany, and the New Global Order."
During the past ten years, there had been a resurgence of interest in Germany's
colonial history in both academic and popular writing. This paper examines
this renewed focus on German colonialism, arguing that it is motivated by
three developments in the contemporary political situation that have taken
place on three separate planes. First, on the domestic level, discussions
of multiculturalism have made clear the inadequacy of a historical model
that for too long has framed questions of "race" and "racism" within the
German context solely within the model of a German-Jewish binary. Second,
on the continental plane, the formation of the European Union has brought
the continent of Europe as a political identity into sharp relief, calling
attention to the cultural and historical elements which European nations
have in common. Colonial history, for all its ambivalences, is primary on
that list, having formed the cultural identity of the European continent
itself, as world systems theorists have long argued. Finally, on the level
of the transnational economy, the era of globalization has made us aware
of the "globe" as an ideological space that is parallel to, and mutually
constitutive of, the "nation." The growing significance of the "globe" as
an imaginary construct calls for a reexamination of its cultural history--a
project that necessarily must focus on the colonial era as the period that
brought forth the understanding of the "globe" upon which the contemporary
discourse of "globalization" is founded. On all three of these planes, German
colonial history offers much to our understanding of today's world and of
Germany's place within it.
Andreas Ludwig - "Discursive Logics in the Material Representation of East-German
History."
The changes in East Germany drew attention to its history and history of
private life before 1989. In addition to political history, the history of
every day culture and history of every day life ("Alltagskultur",
"Alltagsgeschichte") were discussed with unexpected intensity in museums
and exhibitions, opening up a wide range of topics and professional approaches.
The resulting material representations of the former GDR have encouraged
interdisciplinary work and have complemented the process of change and cultural
re-information in East German society. The paper will ask if recent work
of this type belong to a nostalgic review ("Ostalgie") provoked by social
and cultural changes, or if they belong to a critical consciousness that
integrates history, memory, and individual life experience.
Alf Luedtke - "Victory and Defeat - or Multiple Normalities? Competing Hindsights
on the History of the Two Germanies, 1945-89."
Professor Luedtke will discuss the range of perspective applied to the two
Germanies after 1989/90. To a large extent the majority in the West but also
in the East - many academics among them - cast the history of both East and
West Germany in linear terms. In binary ways, what appeared as "sucess of
the West" or as "defeat" or "implosion" of the East called for historical
narratives and analytical underpinnings. The parallel focus on the political
regime and dictatorship added a tunnel view: links between the Nazi past
and the GDR seemed self evident. Similar appraisals of both the socio-political
(dis-)continuities after 1945 in the West and, even more, of the multi-facetted
resonances between both Germanies and across the Iron Curtain have still
to come. In other words: to explore the social practice of people's everyday
is the task that has been blocked by dominant readings of Germany's past
after 1945.
Kaspar Maase - "A Republic of Provincials? - National Culture and Regional
Identities in Unified Germany."
Professor Maase considers how the meaning of national culture, its
representatives, and its debates have developed in recent years. The suggestion
is that its relevance for the ordinary citizen has been lost and that a
displacement towards stronger regional identities is occurring, which Professor
Maase will illuminate. He discusses that instead of a "Fourth Reich" emerging
after the Wende, a Berlin Republic of provincials emerged.
Eggo Mueller - Revised Memories: German Television's Representation of "10
Years After."
Unlike sculptures or monuments as "central memorials," television's historical
memory is transitory: It represents a "national" anniversary like the fall
of the wall every year in a revised way, reacting flexibly within the current
ideological situation. This year's 10th anniversary of the opening of the
wall (not of the unification!) coincides with the 50th anniversary of the
German Federal Republic, a coincidence which often is used -- like in the
central exhibition "50 Deutsche Jahre" in Berlin" -- to construct a new founding
myth of the so called "Berlin Republic". The paper will examine television
programs dealing with this historical moment. Since there will be so many
reruns of older programs dealing with the "unification", television might
function more as an "archive of memories", representing a multivocal memory.
Eric Rentschler - "New German Levity"
The paper provides a critique of film comedies by Doerrie, Graf, Wortmann,
Kaufmann, and others. Professor Rentschler will focus on how these
fantasies of consensus negotiate the present as well as confront the legacy
of 1968 (including the Autoenfilm and New German Cinema). The larger concern
will be the formulation of a new national cinema that is resolutely not
international, not arthouse fare, and not invested in alternative culture
(au contraire!).
Sabine Wilke - "History as Fictional Construct: "The Staging of Documentary
Material in Margarete von Trotta's 'Das Verspechen' (The Promise)".
Professor Wilke will present a discussion of the narrative and visual techniques
in Trotta's filmic adaption of Peter Schneider's narrative "Das Versprechen"
which focuses on the way the events in 1989 are told. She argues that history
is presented as a fictional construct consisting out of constructed images
that play on the "promise" of documentary images. This technique is compared
to other films and documentaries such as "Nikolaikirche", "Das Volk sprengt
seine Mauern" and others which narrate the same event.
RELATED EVENTS
Graduate Student Workshop
The actual conference will be preceded by a Graduate Student Workshop on
Thursday, December 2, 1999. Ulrike Peters and David Goldberg, Graduate Students
in German and History at the University of Michigan, are in charge of the
organization of this workshop, which will address issues related to the questions
raised in the above conference description. Faculty will serve as moderators
and commentators througout this graduate part of the conference.
For information, contact
upeters@umich.edu or
dgoldbrg@umich.edu
A special effort will also be made to prepare students for this workshop.
With this goal in mind, the faculty at the University of Michigan are teaching
and planning several courses for the Winter and Fall terms on both the
undergraduate and graduate level related to the conference theme.
"Berlin: Constructing History", November 29-December 6
CES and the School of Architecture, in conjunction with the Departments of
Film & Video, Germanic Languages & Literatures, and the Program in
Comparative Literature, are organizing a film series and architecture symposium
to highlight the current construction in Berlin and the attending controversies.
The week long film series in Lorch Hall begins on the 29th along with a photo
exhibit, "Berlin—Images of the City", in the II gallery. The architecture
symposium will be on December 5th.
Films include: Berlin: Symphony of a City (Walter Ruttman, 1927),
Berlin—Still Life (L. Moholy-Nagy, 1926), Gypsies
(Maholy-Nagy, 1932), Berlin Wie es War (Leo de Laforgue, [1940]/1950),
Wings of Desire (Wim Wenders, 1988), and The Wall (Jürgen
Böttcher, 1990).
We gratefully acknowledge support from the following sponsors:
Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst (DAAD) | DaimlerChrysler Corporation
Fund | Consulate General of the Federal Republic of Germany, Detroit |
World Heritage Foundation | Goethe-Institut, Ann Arbor | Michigan Theater.
University of Michigan: Office of the Vice President for Research |
International Institute | Center for European Studies | Department of
Germanic Languages and Literatures | Program in Film and Video Studies |
Center for Russian and Eastern European Studies | Department of Sociology
|
Department of History | College of Architecture and Urban Planning.