THE POLITICS OF TIME AND STATE IDENTITY IN THE GERMAN DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC

Q2 Arts and Humanities

Transactions of the Royal Historical Society Pub Date : 2019-12-01 DOI:10.1017/S0080440119000100

Marcus Colla

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引用次数: 1

Abstract

ABSTRACT The communist regimes of Eastern Europe carried a particular set of assumptions about the way past, present and future related to one another. In the case of the German Democratic Republic (the GDR), these assumptions manifested themselves in official language and propaganda as a defence of the regime's dynamic and forward-looking historicity against the ‘ahistorical’ and ‘nostalgic’ modes of understanding that supposedly typified the historical consciousness of its West German adversary. By this view, the German Federal Republic – and the capitalist West more generally – lacked both a meaningful past and a meaningful future. This article investigates how the East German regime articulated its historicity as a direct expression of its state identity. In particular, it examines how it sought to rationalise newly emerging historical and cultural practices in the GDR within the framework of a modern and progressive socialist historicity, and how it deployed these as an argument against the ‘nostalgic’ practices of the Federal Republic.

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德意志民主共和国的时间政治与国家认同

摘要东欧的共产主义政权对过去、现在和未来的相互关系有一套特殊的假设。以德意志民主共和国（GDR）为例，这些假设在官方语言和宣传中表现出来，作为对该政权动态和前瞻性历史性的辩护，反对所谓代表其西德对手历史意识的“非历史”和“怀旧”理解模式。根据这一观点，德意志联邦共和国——以及更普遍的资本主义西方——既缺乏有意义的过去，也缺乏有价值的未来。本文探讨了东德政权如何将其历史性表述为其国家身份的直接表达。特别是，它考察了它如何在现代和进步的社会主义历史性框架内，寻求将民主德国新出现的历史和文化实践合理化，以及它如何将这些实践作为反对联邦共和国“怀旧”实践的论据。

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Transactions of the Royal Historical Society Arts and Humanities-History

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期刊介绍： The Royal Historical Society has published the highest quality scholarship in history for over 150 years. A subscription includes a substantial annual volume of the Society’s Transactions, which presents wide-ranging reports from the front lines of historical research by both senior and younger scholars, and two volumes from the Camden Fifth Series, which makes available to a wider audience valuable primary sources that have hitherto been available only in manuscript form.