Remembering
East
Germany's
Peaceful
Revolution
Project Background
In 1992, Molly Andrews conducted interviews with 40 East Germans, most of whom had been leading critics of the East German government, and had played an important role in contributing to the bloodless revolution of 1989. They included artists, actors, religious leaders, scientists, and politicians, but also official employees and informal informants of the Stasi, as well as academics, writers and politicians who were members of the Communist Party up until 1989. Twenty years later, she conducted a follow-up study with fifteen of the original forty participants, predominantly with those who had been dissidents in 1989.
Remembering East Germany’s peaceful revolution:
Twenty-five years later
Based on this longitudinal study, there were two exhibitions which were organized, timed to coincide with the 25th anniversary of the opening of the Berlin Wall: the first was in London, at the German Historical Institute (31 October 2014 – 31 January 2015), and the second in Berlin at the Wissenschaftzentrum (12 November 2014 – 31 March 2015). When looking back on East Germany’s peaceful revolution of 1989 many recall the great speed of events – the rigged election, the 40th anniversary of the birth of the country, the Monday night vigils, the huge demonstrations, the exodus across the borders, the opening of the wall, and less than 12 months later, the formal reunification of Germany – days and weeks which altered the face of the political world forever. The focus of this project has been to explore the meaning of living through these momentous changes, in conversations carried out over two decades.
The exhibitions were organized around four themes which featured in the interviews:
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the intersection of biographical and historical change (“Generations”);
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the role of the past in the present (“Representation of East German History”);
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the meaning of being from East Germany (“East German Identity”); and finally
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memories of the night the Berlin Wall was opened, and subsequent anniversaries of that event (“November 9th”).
The exhibition at the German Historical Insitute London (GHIL) was preceded by a half-day symposium focused on the personal testimonies of three people who had been key activists in the events leading up to the opening of the wall: nuclear physicist Sebastian Plugbeil, architect and green activist Reinhard Weisshuhn, and psychoanalyst and writer Annette Simon. There were two panels organised around the themes of the representation of East German history (chaired by historian Dorothee Wierling) and cultural memory (chaired by psychologist Jens Brockmeier).
The exhibition at the Wissenschaftzentrum Berlin (WZB) was organized around portraits of the fifteen project participants which Molly Andrews commissioned from photographer Vaughan Melzer, which were displayed along photographs of the individuals taken twenty years earlier.
Molly Andrews
Molly Andrews is the concept initiator and the lead researcher on this project throughout its duration. She also orchestrated both exhibitions and the symposium in 2014.
Molly Andrews is Professor of Political Psychology, and Co-director of the Centre for Narrative Research at the University of East London, in London, England. Her research interests include the psychological basis of political commitment, psychological challenges posed by societies in transition to democracy, patriotism, conversations between generations, gender and aging, and counter-narratives.
Her monographs include Lifetimes of Commitment: Aging, Politics, Psychology (Cambridge 1991/2008), Shaping History: Narratives of Political Change (Cambridge 2007) and Narrative Imagination and Everyday Life (Oxford 2014). Shaping History won the 2008 Outstanding Book of the Year Award of the American Education Research Association, Narrative and Research Special Interest Group, and has been translated into Chinese. She is a co-investigator on the NOVELLA project (Narratives of Varied Everday Lives and Linked Approaches), a three year project funded by Britain’s National Centre for Research Methods.
Visit the page for Molly Andrews' Publications.
Email Professor Andrews (M.Andrews@uel.ac.uk) to request the exhibition video.
Visit the Robert Havemann Gesellschaft Archive for all materials pertaining to this longitudinal project.
Photographer Vaughan Melzner was commissioned to photograph 14 of the project participants in Berlin. Her work, in the form of black and white portraits, was exhibited at the WZB in November 2014. Her colour photographs were part of the exhibition at the GHIL as well as featuring in the short film Remembering November 9th (Droth, 2014).
Visit Vaughan Melzer's website.
Vaughan Melzner
Birgit Schmitt
Birgit Schmitt was the German project coordinator and primary translator for both Phase One and Phase Two of the project. She is a trained psychologist .
Archive Images
The black and white photographs seen in the short film Remembering November 9th (Droth, 2014) have been generously supplied by the Robert Havemann Gesellschaft, the leading archive of the East German dissident movement. In most cases, individual photographers have been identified, but several photos have come from the files of Ministerium für Staatssicherheit (MfS), otherwise known as the Stasi. These images are easily identified by the characteristic framing by the camera lens, which is visible and appears as a black circle.
Visit the Robert Havemann Gesellschaft website and explore their online archive on GDR opposition.
Funding
Project funded by:
The Max Planck Institute, Berlin
The WZB: Berlin Social Science Center (Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin für Sozialforschung)
Credits
German project co-ordinator and translator (within interviews) – Birgit Schmitt
Exhibition graffic designer – Stefan Walter
Exhibition coordinator – Barbara Droth
Photo archivist – Christoph Ochs, Robert Havemann Gesellschaft
Portraits – Vaughan Melzer
Transcriber and translator - Max Haberich
Filmmaker and subtitles – Barbara Droth
Website design - Barbara Droth