Making Room for November 9, 1989?
Making Room for November 9, 1989?
The Fall of the Berlin Wall in German Politics and Memory
Why has the fall of the Berlin Wall—a moment in which Germans took extraordinary risks to challenge authoritarianism—not developed into a resonant founding myth of a unified, democratic Germany? This chapter offers three answers to this puzzle. First, the preexisting field of memory in Germany was so structured by a Holocaust-centered memory regime that alternative memory regimes, such as one constructed around heroic interpretations of November 9, 1989, were blocked. Second, since unification has failed to erase economic differences between East and West, it was difficult to celebrate 1989 as an unambiguously positive moment for Germany as a whole. Third, the contested memory of the East German regime has made it difficult to construct anything approaching a common interpretation. Given that none of these three dynamics shows any signs of attenuating, the fall of the Wall is likely to remain a muted, tempered memory regime in German politics.
Keywords: Germany, Holocaust memory, Berlin Wall, German unification
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