Remembering 1989

Auteur

Anke Pinkert is associate professor of German and media and cinema studies at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, where she is also the Head of the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures. She is the author of Film and Memory in East Germany.

Texte du rabat

"1989 is an iconic date, one we associate with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Cold War-a date that prompts some to rue the defeat for socialism in the East while others celebrate a victory for democracy and capitalism in the re-unified Germany. Remembering 1989 focuses on a largely forgotten "interregnum" between these: the months between the outbreak of protests in the German Democratic Republic in 1989 and its absorption by the West in 1990. Anke Pinkert, who herself participated on those protests, recalls these months as a volatile but joyous "laboratory of radical democracy," and tells the story of how and why this "time out of joint" has been erased from Germany's national memory. Drawing on rich archives including videotapes of untelevised protests, illegally printed petitions by Church leaders, audio recordings of dissident meetings, and interview footage with military troops, Pinkert opens the discarded history of East European social uprisings to new interpretations and imagines alternatives to Germany's neoliberal status quo. The result is a vivid, unexpected contribution to memory studies and European history"--