Apologies for cross-posting. 
Seminar Series. All welcome.
From 'Stasiland' to 'Ostalgie': Remembering the GDR Twenty Years On

Two decades since the fall of the Berlin Wall, a wide variety of interpretations
and representations of the GDR (former East Germany) have emerged. Twenty years
is the halfway point of the celebrated ‘forty years’ (also the title of his
autobiography) that Günter de Bruyn and others claimed would be needed to come
to terms with the forty years of the socialist state. It also means that a
generation has come to adulthood with the GDR only as an inherited memory. This
seminar series marks the twentieth anniversary of the end of the GDR and
explores what has become of the state that existed there for so long as history,
memory and myth: examining the way it has been remembered and re-imagined during
the last twenty years and the traces it has left in modern German politics,
philosophy, landscape, literature and film. Is it a ‘footnote in world history’
(Timothy Garton Ash) or fundamental to understanding the dynamics of
contemporary Europe? Eight leading experts from UK, Germany and USA offer their
views. It is only through understanding that very particular history and the
ways we choose to remember it that we can understand the Germans today. 

Week 1 (20th Jan) Prof. Wolfgang Emmerich (Bremen) 
Cultural Memory East / West: Is what belongs together growing together?

Week 2 (27th Jan) Prof. T.J. Reed (Oxford)
Revisiting the Wende 

Week 3 (3rd Feb) Prof. Katrin Kohl (Oxford)
Conceptualising the GDR - 20 Years After

Week 4 (10th Feb) Dr Peter Thompson (Sheffield/Oxford)
‘Die unheimliche Heimat’: The GDR as the Presence and Absence of Hope

Week 5 (17th Feb) Dr Daniela Berghahn (RHUL) 
Remembering the Stasi: from DEFA Gegenwartsfilm to the Stasi fairytale Das Leben
der Anderen

Week 6 (24th Feb) Dr Lyn Marven (Liverpool) 
‘Berlin ist bekannt [...] für die Mauer, die es aber nicht mehr gibt’(Monika
Maron): the persistence of East Berlin in the contemporary city

Week 7 (3rd March) Dr Chloe Paver (Exeter)
Memory and Place in the New Bundesländer

Week 8 (10th March) Prof. Timothy Garton Ash (Oxford)
‘A Footnote in World History’: The GDR as Memory, Myth and History

These seminars will all take place at 5.30pm in the Noël Salter Room in New
College, Oxford. Wine will be served. All welcome.

Professor Jan-Wener Müller (Princeton University) will give a special lecture
Thursday May 21st to round off the series.

A programme with full details, abstracts and directions is available at:

http://www.mod-langs.ox.ac.uk/german/rememberthegdr

Contact: [log in to unmask]

K.J. Leeder
Professor of Modern German Literature
Fellow and Tutor in German,
New College, Oxford