Remembering 1989 - by Anke Pinkert

About the Book

"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"--

Book 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.

Review Quotes

"Remembering 1989 is complex, packed with intriguing historical detail and highly political: given the contemporary rise of antidemocratic politics, it provides much food for thought. . . It is a must-read for those in German Studies and beyond, providing a strong case for the role of Memory Studies in challenging the status quo and shifting the focus from powerful, normative narratives to the peripheral."-- "European History Quarterly"

"Remembering 1989 is a landmark achievement. Pinkert's recovery of the traces of revolution, and her teasing out of connections with more recent moments of social protest from Occupy and the Arab Spring to Black Lives Matter, will also help direct the field of memory studies toward examining as-yet-unrealized, alternative futures, which are urgently needed in this moment of global democratic decline and authoritarian resurgence."-- "Katrin Sieg, Georgetown University"

"Remembering 1989 is a sustained probing of the mechanisms of history and memory, showing through careful analysis how these shards of memory continue to affect the present and the future. Pinkert writes with vividness and clarity as she turns her critical eye to public spaces, memorials, art installations, photography, and films that open up a critique of the dominant notion that the socialist revolution failed and then vanished without a trace."-- "Leslie Morris, University of Minnesota"

"Arguing decisively against the Western triumphalism that dominated the story of 1989 after the Cold War, Pinkert offers a compelling account of how counternarratives survive at the margins. Through well-chosen empirical cases and sophisticated aesthetic analysis, Pinkert provides a new theorization of how archives intersect with cultural memory. In so doing, she invites us to rethink political possibility in moments of uncertainty, danger, and crisis."-- "Jonathan Bach, The New School"

About the Author

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.