CIAO DATE: 12/2008
Volume: 26, Issue: 2
Summer 2008
Migration and Cultural Interaction across the Centuries: German History in a European Perspective (PDF)
Dirk Hoerder
Bordered nation-state approaches are increasingly challenged and they rarely hold up under critical questioning. In this essay I discuss the cultural interactions across Central Europe that preceded the nineteenth-century development of national consciousness and—for many only after 1918—independent states. I argue that identities based on religion, profession or craft, administrative or military expertise characterized people more than those founded on ethnocultural/ regional origin during the various migrations of the period. A dual outward-inward perspective focuses on the influence of German-speakers in other parts of Europe and on men and women from other cultures in the core German-language regions. I carry the story up to the 1930s and I argue that transregional and transcultural approaches are empirically sounder than transnational ones. It follows that migrant destinations also need to be addressed as micro- or macro-regions—the several distinct locations in Eastern, East Central, and Southeastern Europe, for example—rather than in terms of states.
New Places, New Identities: The (Ever) Changing Concept of Heimat
Uta Larkey
This article analyzes contrasting notions of Heimat and Fremde, as explored cinematographically by three contemporary German filmmakers. The spatial aspect of Heimat, traditionally connected to a particular region or even neighborhood denotes the sense of belonging, whereas the temporal aspect—often associated with childhood and youth—carries the sense of longing. In the second half of the twentieth century, the concept has shifted to include identity, reflection and self-reflection, the loss of Heimat, and even multiple Heimaten. The article argues further that the notions of Heimat and Fremde are not mutually exclusive, but interdependent. Peter Lilienthal’s film Ein Fremder concludes that in parts of German society the binary opposites of Heimat and Fremde are still intact. On the other hand, Peter Patzak in Adeus und Goodbye shows how Heimat and Fremde are mutually dependent and include a search for identity and individuality. In Michael Gutmann’s travelogue-documentary, Familienreise, the protagonists experience aspects of Fremde and Heimatlosigkeit without ever finding Heimat.
We Acted as Though We Were in a Movie—Memories of an East German Subculture
Lutz Kube
Leander Haußmann (Sonnenallee), a theater and film director with East German roots, contributed the documentary Die Durchmacher to the television series Denk ich an Deutschland. In his documentary, Haußmann interviews some of his old friends who in the late 1970s formed a group in East Berlin and presents their stories about the time. This paper explores the image of the German Democratic Republic that is created by the memories of the participants and their presentation through Haußmann. An important element of the memories is the perspective from which they come: out of a subculture that tried to escape East German reality with only limited success. This article also examines how the ambiguity and unreliability of memories are presented in the film. The documentary is put into the context of a debate on the concept of "Ostalgia" (Ostalgie), arguing that this can still be a productive means to communicate East German experiences without idealizing them.
When the Son Is Older than the Father: Dominik Graf’s Denk ich an Deutschland Television Film
Margit Sinka
Dominik Graf’s Wispern im Berg der Dinge (A Whispering in the Mountain of Things) was the second film televised in the twelve-part Denk ich an Deutschland-documentary series launched on the eve of Germany’s eighth Day of Unity (October 1998). Though Graf does not refer directly to Heinrich Heine, he clearly takes Heine’s mode of thinking about Germany seriously—that is, he resolutely focuses on ruptures, which characterize Heine and his writings, and on the tensions provoked by the interplay of opposites evident in Heine’s poem Nachtgedanken (1843), the source of the Denk ich an Deutschland phrase. In Graf’s documentary, Heine’s ruptures turn into ruptures between his father’s excessively silent war generation and his own unanchored post 1968 generation. The tensions, on the other hand, are evoked by the filmic medium—in particular, between verbal and iconic images. Thinking about film when he thinks about Germany, Graf examines his deceased father’s many roles in the West German films of the 1950s and 1960s—roles that had turned him into the representative of the damaged war generation. Faulting the purely verbal in a medium intended to give concrete, visual form to reality, Graf attempts to harness the powers of both verbal and iconic images in the service of identity formation, yet grants the edge to the iconic, as well as to the fictional rather than the factual.
Transport Infrastructure in Shrinking (East) Germany
Weert Canzler
Policy on transport infrastructure in Germany will come under increasing pressure thanks to considerable changes in basic conditions. Demographic change, shifts in economic and regional structures, continued social individualization, and the chronic budget crisis in the public sphere are forcing a readjustment of government action. At root, the impact of the changes in demographics and economic structures touches on what Germans themselves think their postwar democracy stands for. Highly consensual underlying assumptions about Germany as a model are being shaken. The doctrine that development of infrastructure is tantamount to growth and prosperity no longer holds. The experience in eastern Germany shows that more and better infrastructure does not automatically lead to more growth. Moreover, uniform government regulation is hitting limits. If the differences between boom regions and depopulated zones remain as large as they are, then it makes no sense to have the same regulatory maze apply to both cases. In transportation policy, that shift would mean recasting the legal foundations of public transport.