Remembering 1989: Future Archives of Public Protest - Couverture souple

Pinkert, Anke

Couverture souple

ISBN 10 : 0226835332 ISBN 13 : 9780226835334

Editeur : University of Chicago Press, 2024

Synopsis

This account of the “laboratory of radical democracy” in the months before East Germany’s absorption in the West challenges memories of Germany’s reunification.

For many, 1989 is an iconic date, one we associate with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Cold War. The year prompts some to rue the defeat of socialism in the East, while others celebrate a victory for democracy and capitalism in the reunified Germany. Remembering 1989 focuses on a largely forgotten interregnum: 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 in 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.

Remembering 1989 argues that in order to truly understand Germany’s historic transformation, we must revisit protesters’ actions across a wide range of minor, vernacular, and often transient sources. 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.

A propos du livre

À propos de l'auteur

Anke Pinkert is associate professor of German and media and cinema studies at the University of Illinois at 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.

Détails de l'édition

• Éditeur: University of Chicago Press
• Date d'édition: 2024
• Langue: anglais
• ISBN 10: 0226835332
• ISBN 13: 9780226835334
• Reliure: Broché
• Nombre de pages: 339
• Coordonnées du fabricant: non disponible
• Personne responsable: non disponible