overview
East Germany:
Part of Germany Since 1990
Ilko-Sascha Kowalczuk Historian
In 1989 and 1990, two historical events took place that have been much discussed, debated, and argued over. The 1989 Peaceful Revolution brought down the SED dictatorship in East Germany and the two Germanies were united in a new democratic state the following year. While these events brought an end to the post-war period in Germany and ushered in the New Europe, their overall importance in world history is a matter of conjecture. We do not yet know for certain whether future historians will treat any events as decisive caesuras of global, or perhaps just European importance, whether we are talking about the 1973 oil crisis, the 1989 / 91 anti-communist revolutions and the collapse and dissolution of the Soviet Union, the 2001 terrorist attacks against the twin towers, or the 2020 / 2021 Coronavirus pandemic. Caesuras help to map, order, clarify, and arrange history in order to be able to relate past events, freeze-framed as history, in a structured way. Large-scale caesuras, such as those above, provide a framework, which internal caesuras, depending on the issue under scrutiny and the methodological approach, help to justify. These“ major” caesuras follow political-historical considerations, but they are“ porous” because political-historical caesurae almost never have an immediate impact on economic, cultural, mental, and social structures, processes, and phenomena. Societies are often far more sluggish and often don’ t change in lockstep with these epoch-changing events. This happens only in exceptional cases and cannot even be shown conclusively to have happened in Germany in 1945, 1918, or 1933. In the case of 1989 / 90, research has so far not even problematized the caesura, but it seems obvious that the fall of the Berlin wall on November 9, 1989, and monetary union on July 1, 1990, when the West German Mark was introduced in the GDR, had such a profound impact on the lives of every single East German— monetary union even more so than the fall of the wall— that these two events do indeed represent a major caesura. Most East Germans were not directly involved in the
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Observing Memories Issue 5