Despite the three decades that have passed since the fall of the Berlin Wall, the historical narrative of East Germany is hardly fixed in public memory, as German society continues to grapple with the legacies of the Cold War. This fascinating ethnography looks at two very different types of local institutions in one eastern German state that take divergent approaches to those legacies: while publicly funded organizations reliably cast the GDR as a dictatorship, a main regional newspaper offers a more ambivalent perspective colored by the experiences and concerns of its readers. As author Anselma Gallinat shows, such memory work—initially undertaken after fundamental regime change—inevitably shapes citizenship and democracy in the present.

Despite the three decades that have passed since the fall of the Berlin Wall, the historical narrative of East Germany is hardly fixed in public memory, as German society continues to grapple with the legacies of the Cold War. This fascinating ethnography looks at two very different types of local institutions in one eastern German state that take divergent approaches to those legacies: while publicly funded organizations reliably cast the GDR as a dictatorship, a main regional newspaper offers a more ambivalent perspective colored by the experiences and concerns of its readers. As author Anselma Gallinat shows, such memory work—initially undertaken after fundamental regime change—inevitably shapes citizenship and democracy in the present.

Introduction: Questions of Discourse, Narrative and Memory after Fundamental Regime-Change


Chapter 1. Remembering East Germany in the United Nation – The Second German Dictatorship and Dual History
Chapter 2. Institutions that Write History – The Working Group Aufarbeitung and the Daily Paper Introduced
Chapter 3. Debating the Past at the Daily Paper – The East German Border Regime

Chapter 4. Ordering Memory for Government – Everyday Life in East Germany
Chapter 5. What Makes an Aufarbeiter, a Journalist?
Chapter 6. Democracy in Trouble – Remembering to Safeguard the Future
Chapter 7. Memory for Citizenship – the Trouble with Democracy

Concluding Remarks

Glossary                                
Bibliography