Thirty years ago, on October 3, 1990, two German states became one. The academy, however, had a long way to go before it could begin to make a similar claim. The relatively swift dismantling of the “Wall on the ground” did not occasion an equally swift dismantling of the so-called “Wall in the head,” especially within the historical field in the new Federal Republic. Young scholars from the “Workers’ and Peasants’ State” launched their careers as professional historians in a profoundly different political and social context than the one into which they had been socialized. Few would describe this new academic constellation as “unified.” This forum developed, on the occasion of the thirtieth anniversary of the events of 1989–1990, as an attempt to understand the ways that having lived through a world-historical transition has impacted the work of historians from the former German Democratic Republic. It explores the ways these scholars’ experiences—lived experiences of a necessarily transnational kind of history—have shaped their appreciation of the project of history: its form, its purpose, its promises, and its limits. It considers the ways the academy in the new Federal Republic did and did not make room for these scholars and their historiographical perspectives. It reflects on the power of culture, politics, and memory on conceptualizations of the past. To engage with these themes, Central European History's editor invited Jennifer Allen (Yale University) to convene a forum. She invited Stefan-Ludwig Hoffmann (University of California, Berkeley), Christina Morina (Universität Bielefeld), and Patrice Poutrus (Universität Erfurt) to participate.

Could you summarize your biography?

Hoffmann: I grew up in the 1970s and 1980s in a socialist Plattenbau next to Berlin's Alexanderplatz, essentially the neighborhood of Good Bye, Lenin! My mother was a dramaturg at East Berlin's main children's theater. My father was working at the Academy of Arts on radical Left Weimar theater, in particular on Bertolt Brecht and Erwin Piscator. My parents were not dissidents, but they belonged to the intellectual Bohème. Because of my family background, I was not selected to attend the Gymnasium in the “Worker and Peasant State.” But because these were the twilight years of state socialism, children of the intelligentsia often found their niches based on family connections. For two years, I became an intern at the photo archives of the Academy of Arts, working during the day and attending evening classes after work to obtain my Abitur. This also meant that I remained outside the orbit of the state's higher education indoctrination. My predecessor at this job was Bert Neumann, who in the 1990s became the main stage designer for Frank Castorf's Volksbühne, and there were several other children of the intelligentsia parked in these niches of late socialism. It's difficult to explain today that we were all on the Left and socially privileged yet at the same time in opposition to the state.

After the Abitur, my application to study history at university was rejected. Again the Academy of Arts came to my rescue, protesting that it would desperately need my services as a historian in five years, which was, of course, bogus. After a protracted admission process, including a surreal hearing of my case in front of an admissions committee of a dozen representatives of state organizations and only one professor from the History Department, I finally started studying at Karl Marx University Leipzig in the fall of 1987. We began with prehistory and archeology and arrived at the French Revolution in the fall of 1989. Of my cohort (of about forty, some from other socialist states in Europe, Asia, and Africa), only one other student ended up becoming a history professor (of Classics, now at Humboldt University); the two of us belonged to the small group of students who were not party members.

My parents had studied at Leipzig's drama school in the 1950s and attended university lectures by Ernst Bloch, Werner Krauss, and Hans Mayer. But by the late 1980s, Leipzig had become a “red” university with many dreadful party line professors. There was not much for me to learn and, by the fall of 1989, I had plans to leave the GDR, following many of my friends who were already in West Berlin. Then the demonstrations started in late September. On October 2, we were chased by riot police in the streets around the university and were expecting to be arrested and expelled. For a few weeks, it seemed as if participating in what felt like a revolution made a difference. We circulated and discussed the leaflets of Neues Forum and other new grassroots civic organizations. If you read these samizdat publications today, it's striking to see how much the leaflets and programs criticized the socialist state from the Left, which included the church-affiliated peace and ecological movements. As at Tiananmen Square a few months earlier, protesters were singing the “International” and “We Shall Overcome.”

As is well known, October 9 was the pivotal moment when the party elites hesitated to order the “people's police” to open fire, mainly because the ruling class itself had lost faith in state socialism. “Everything was forever, until it was no more,” the title of my Berkeley colleague Alexei Yurchak's book on late socialism, captures the defining experience for our generation. The fall of the Wall exactly a month later in many ways ended this revolutionary interval. By late November, the demonstrations in Leipzig and elsewhere became more nationalistic, essentially pre-AfD, as I would say today. We saw racist attacks against migrants in Hoyerswerda (1991) or Rostock (1992). More people have died in Germany since 1990 as a result of right-wing violence than at the Berlin Wall.Footnote ¹ Through the new independent student council I got to know students from West Germany, who came to Leipzig and provided support, for example, in the form of our first copy machine. They recommended studying at Bielefeld with Reinhart Koselleck, Jürgen Kocka, and Hans-Ulrich Wehler. When I arrived at Bielefeld, the head of admissions asked me into his office and welcomed me as the first “East German” at the university.

After two years at Bielefeld, I went to Johns Hopkins for a year to obtain a master of arts as part of a graduate exchange program. Hopkins seemed like academic paradise to me. There were as many professors as graduate students in my cohort, and we were expected to present our first-year paper in front of the faculty, from J.G.A. Pocock to Judith Walkowitz (City of Dreadful Delight had just been published). The faculty seemed less hierarchical and less male dominated, and it was also more diverse, at least in comparison to Bielefeld. I also felt liberated from the insular German East-West debates after unification and wished, with Shakespeare, “a plague on both of my houses.” As much as I despised SED party ideologues before 1989, I was also fed up with post facto anti-communism and Stasi hysteria. I contemplated applying for graduate school in the United States. But I returned to Bielefeld, in part, because I wanted to work with Wehler and Koselleck and, in part, because a fellowship was waiting for me at a time when my parents were struggling to hold onto their jobs post-unification. I received my PhD in November 1999 summa cum laude and started teaching as an assistant professor at Ruhr-Universität Bochum in 2000. With the support of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation (and James J. Sheehan as my host, with whom I had shared an office for one semester in Bielefeld), I returned for a year to the United States as a post-doc at Stanford and Berkeley. In 2008, I got a position as a tenured director of a research group at the Zentrum für Zeithistorische Forschung (ZZF) in Potsdam and, three years later, accepted my current position at Berkeley.

Morina: I was thirteen when the Wall came down. Born and raised in Frankfurt/Oder on the border with Poland, I received my primary education in the GDR. My parents both worked as science teachers in secondary schools, and as long as the Wall stood—and I say this not only in retrospect—I knew that it was best and safest to seek professional training outside the most ideologically charged fields such as history or journalism. My mom came from a family with roots in Alsace and the Saarland. Her mother had moved to the east of Germany in the 1950s for love, not expecting, of course, that after August 1961 she would not even be allowed to attend her mother's funeral. Or that precious color negatives of her deceased husband sent from the West would never arrive and be lost forever as a result of postal controls. These stories, and many others that piled up in a divided family trying to keep in touch across the Iron Curtain, had a deep impact on me. Early on I was interested in things political. We were faithful followers of Western television news. My dad read several newspapers—the most dogmatic ones (Neues Deutschland) as well as some of the more critical ones you could get (Wochenpost, Das Magazin, Sputnik), and when relatives visited from the West or when my mother was finally allowed, that one time in the late 1980s, to visit West Berlin for twenty-four hours, things always seemed exciting and frightening at the same time. I was often told to watch my mouth in school, especially after an uncle of mine applied for permission to leave the GDR permanently in 1988 and not least of all because my dad was the deputy head of my school (he was offered the directorship on condition that he become a party member, which he refused). Frequently, I felt pressured and intimidated in school, in particular by our civics education teacher, who was as charismatic as he was mean, encouraging debate only to denounce dissent as subversive action. When the Wall fell in 1989, he was the most vivid impersonation of the confusion and insecurity that suddenly befell many adults around me and the utter sense of liberation we celebrated in our family. I knew what “freedom from fear” felt like long before I heard that phrase for the first time.

I was thus old enough to get a sense of the unfree and restricted essence of life under state socialism but also young enough, fortunately, to be able to fully embrace the opportunities that opened up after the end of the GDR. I studied history, journalism, and political science at the University in Leipzig, and in 2000 I went to study for a year abroad at Ohio University's Contemporary History Institute as an exchange student. I remember how intrigued I was by the very different system of graduate education in the United States. Eventually, I liked it so much that I decided to stay. I received my master's degree in contemporary history in 2002 and subsequently applied successfully for a PhD fellowship at the University of Maryland. In my dissertation (Legacies of Stalingrad, Cambridge University Press, 2007), I explored the political memory of Stalingrad and the Eastern Front war in divided Germany.

A mix of research requirements connected to my emerging field of expertise and unremitting homesickness prompted me eventually to move back to Germany. I got my first academic job at the University of Jena, where I joined the Lehrstuhl of Norbert Frei in 2008. Funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, I moved to Amsterdam in 2009 to conduct research for my second book, the Habilitation, on the genesis of Marxism as a political movement in late-nineteenth-century Europe. Throughout these years, I frequently went back to Jena and taught nineteenth- and twentieth-century history in both places. In 2015, I was appointed DAAD Visiting Assistant Professor at the Duitsland Instituut Amsterdam. Over the years, this marvelous position at the intersection of academic and public education enabled me to widen and deepen my interests to include, for example, Dutch history and memory culture, bystander history, and the history of historiography. Most recently, in September 2019, I was appointed full professor for contemporary history at the University of Bielefeld.

Poutrus: I grew up in East Berlin, near the Berlin Wall. Until the mid-1980s, my life seemed to be picture-perfect in terms of the SED propaganda apparatus: I learned a technical trade at secondary school, identified with the socialist state, was a proud Thälmann-Pioneer (the GDR version of Scouts), and received my Jugendweihe (the GDR's secular equivalent to the first communion). At the age of eighteen, I became a member of the Socialist Unity Party of Germany (Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands, SED) and served in its army, the NVA (Nationale Volksarmee), as an officer for three years. During my military service, my high school sweetheart and I started a family. We were granted an apartment by the caring state, and I eventually became a functionary of the state youth organization (Freie Deutsche Jugend, FDJ), first in my training center and then in the Berlin district office of the centralized GDR youth organization.

Things were, however, quite a bit more complex. I had lived right next to the Berlin Wall since I was a child, but as I grew older it began to irritate me. Like almost all Berlin families, some of our relatives lived in West Berlin. They were allowed to come and visit us every once in a while, yet we could never visit them. That just didn't fit my image of the historical and moral superiority of the “first workers’ and peasants’ state on German soil.” On top of that, in contrast to the East German youth radio station DT 64, better, newer, and more rebellious rock music was almost always broadcast on the West Berlin radio stations, which we could easily tune into from our side of the Wall. For me, those were the first cracks in the façade of the SED state that caused me to become dissatisfied.

As far as the beginning of my scholarly career is concerned, for a long time, I was not permitted to study at university. The number of secondary school students eligible for university outnumbered the limited spots. And despite the fact that I was a young, loyal supporter of the regime, in my case the spot went to my classmate who was from an ethnic German working-class family. After completing my three-year military service, I went to night school and earned my Abitur (university entrance qualification). Even then, I continued to receive a similar response: that there were not enough university spots and that, due to my binational family background (German mother, father from a non–Eastern Bloc country), I was not seen as eligible for one of them. Finally, in 1989, I was allowed to enroll at Humboldt University in East Berlin via correspondence. Then, in the winter semester of 1990–1991, I was finally able to switch to studying at the actual university as a regular student. I obtained my master's degree in history and social sciences in the winter semester 1995–1996. I received my doctorate at Europa University Viadrina in Frankfurt/Oder at the end of 2000. After that, I was fortunate to be granted a post-doctoral position at the German Historical Institute in Washington, DC. This was the best, most liberating year of my professional life. It gave me a certain independence that made me see the German academic system in a new way. When I returned to Germany, I felt more confident about not adhering to any particular school of thought, not picking sides, and not always adhering to the unwritten norms of how things are (supposed to be) done. Since then, I have been an academic nomad. I am currently employed at Erfurt University.

Your career has led you through a variety of academic, cultural, and geographical settings. How different were these contexts? What challenges or opportunities did those differences create for your scholarship?

Poutrus: The most important experience for me was the reorganization of the liberal arts/humanities faculty of Humboldt University (HUB) between 1991 and 1993. It was something like a cultural revolution, with all the contradictions and costs that accompany such changes. It was then that I really realized what I hadn't known or learned in the GDR. I was lacking skills in classical and modern languages. My knowledge of capitalism—something I had vehemently rejected—and civil democracy, as well as the history of communism, proved to be rudimentary. Finally, I noticed that I spoke a very different German than the West Berlin and West German students, who, along with the new professors of the HUB, were setting the tone. This period in which my shortcomings were growing more apparent was also a time of constant debate between students and professors. We argued with the older East German professors about their past and the resulting poor conditions of the present. We argued with the new West German professors about our past in the GDR and how they could be so sure what was best for the HUB and East Germany. And we argued among ourselves about what kind of life we had lived in the GDR and what that now meant. It became clear to me, even back then, that the simple confrontation of overwhelmed East Germans, on one hand, and arrogant West Germans, on the other, did not even begin to describe the circumstances at Humboldt University in the early 1990s. This constellation would shape my view of this period, which in hindsight I would call the most difficult time of my life. After my PhD, I studied xenophobia and racism in the GDR. At one point, I no longer wanted to research these subjects anymore, but I was not successful in giving them up. Nowadays, I am considered an expert on these topics, which sometimes annoys me, partly because of the lack of development in debates about xenophobia and racism. We are still at the same point we were twenty years ago, where denial or relativizing “what-about-ism” is still rampant in public as well academic debates. At a certain point, I also got tired of being put in the “bitter East German” box, when I was really interested in the topic of Germany as a whole.

Hoffmann: There wouldn't have been an opportunity for me to work as a historian in the GDR, so either I had to go or the state did. At the same time, having grown up in East Berlin always set me apart, first in West Germany and later in the United States. (Ironically, though, there are more colleagues in Berkeley who grew up under late socialism in some part of the world than there are, for example, in Bielefeld or any other German university, for that matter.) After the stifling atmosphere of late socialism, I experienced graduate school in Bielefeld as formative and exhilarating, especially in combination with the seminars in social and cultural history at Johns Hopkins. I enjoyed teaching in Bochum and working alongside conceptual historians like Lucian Hölscher and Willibald Steinmetz. Ruhr-Universität also has more students from migrant and working-class families than most other German universities, which made teaching more interesting. It was a privilege to direct a research group at the ZZF Potsdam, though I didn't find the intense hierarchies and incessant efforts among German (and European) research institutes to bring in large-scale research grants particularly inspiring. Paradoxically, elite US universities conform much more to Humboldt's idea of a balance between teaching and research than present-day German academia, where tenured professors can buy themselves out of teaching by administrating young scholars without tenure in research “clusters.”

Morina: They were very different, indeed. When I first arrived in Athens, Ohio, I was surprised to learn how much more personal and direct contacts were between students and faculty at the university. Studying became a much narrower, focused activity and graduate school a purer “schooling” experience compared to my undergraduate years in Leipzig, where attendance requirements had been lenient and student politics had been a major part of my academic life. Most striking to me was the brevity of the semesters. Coming from the sixteen-week-long semester of a German university, I had trouble adjusting to the fast proceeding and fully packed quarter/trimester system in the United States. Yet, soon I realized that spending week after week reading and discussing entire monographs with the same group of peers—something rarely done at home—offered an extraordinary learning experience. It furthered my reading skills as much as my academic writing and debating skills.

With a growing number of teaching assignments, first in Ohio and Maryland, then in Jena and Amsterdam, I have learned that teaching German history as a German, even East German, scholar is a highly context-driven and interpersonal undertaking. It was and remains fascinating to look at the history of the country of my origin through the eyes of students and colleagues from different cultural backgrounds. You also realize how crucial language is to understanding history, not only in a narrow sense in terms of being able to read and analyze primary sources, but also in a broader sense in terms of understanding cultural codes, specific contexts, frames of reference, symbolic orders, and structures of meaning.

How have the different intellectual milieux you've inhabited impacted your historical interests or methodology? Where would you locate your intellectual Heimat?

Morina: This a difficult set of questions. On a personal level, I consider my Heimat to be the place where my family lives. Yet, intellectually, as a member of a transnational scholarly community and literary culture, I cannot think of one single Heimat. I have my footing in the German academic system (to which I always wanted to return). But I got my wings in the graduate school system in the United States, where I found my voice as a historian and where I was encouraged more than anywhere else to ask my own questions and express my own thoughts as freely, assertively, and self-reflectively as possible. In the Netherlands, I gained new perspectives on “classic” themes of modern German history, such as World War II and Holocaust memories or the role of bystanders in the persecution of the Jews. Ironically, in a country in which consensus is widely regarded as more valuable and socially beneficial than conflict, I learned the most about moderating historical controversies that routinely spill over into the political and moral sphere.

I am well aware that hindsight tilts my perception of my academic career and that I can rationalize the myriad ways in which personal experiences and professional development might be interrelated. Still, I have come to believe that one of the recurring themes in my work—the nexus between biography and politics—was partly inspired by the fact that I was raised and schooled in two fundamentally different political systems and that my own little life was so immensely transformed by a singular historical event, namely the revolution of 1989. Actually, there was a second momentous event, September 11, 2001, which I witnessed as an intern in Washington, DC, and which, in contrast to the shiny days of the fall of the Wall, dramatically darkened and transformed my American experience.

Hoffmann: My “lost” Heimat is the intelligentsia of late socialism, which is essentially disappearing with my parents’ generation. I felt conflicted about this Heimat when I grew up and was ready to leave in 1989. This is also the reason why I was not interested in working on GDR history post-1989. I was happy to leave the GDR behind. But my biographical background certainly informs the kind of questions I ask. My second intellectual Heimat, both as a social and conceptual historian, is Bielefeld and especially the work of Reinhart Koselleck. I published my first article as a graduate student in a volume edited by Koselleck (on the political veneration of the dead), and I worked as a research assistant for Wehler in the large Bielefeld research project on the Bürgertum. My third intellectual home is Anglophone academe with its global reach. It was always important for me to publish all of my writings simultaneously in English and German. The German version of my first book came out in a series edited by Wehler and Kocka, the English version in a series edited by Geoff Eley (upon the recommendation of David Blackbourn). By now, it feels as if I have more in common with many of my colleagues here in the United States, with their diverse biographical backgrounds, than with my German friends, but of course this also changed over time. It's ironic for me to see how Anglophone historians often ignore German (or French) scholarship, or how West German historians pretend the GDR never existed in their histories of postwar “Germany.”

Poutrus: After my initial university studies, I was very interested in doing research on the GDR. I had the rather arrogant idea that I, as a contemporary, had a privileged view that other (Western) scholars did not and that that point of view was not reflected either in public debates or the academic field at that time. The tendency to massively fund research on the contemporary history of the GDR made that project possible. At first, I worked as a student aid at the new Center for Contemporary History in Potsdam (ZZF) and then become a PhD candidate there. This trajectory, however, led me right into a conflict that had been carried over from the field of historical studies in the old Federal Republic. It was a conflict between political and social history, whose front lines appeared between the “old” Institute of Contemporary History in Munich (IfZ) and the founding of the ZZF. I quickly realized that these fronts also existed within the ZZF. Probably for this reason, I opted for a third route and chose the history of everyday life in the GDR. This decision has influenced (though not always) my fields of study to the present. Still, I have always considered it an advantage not to subscribe to one side or school, and my experiences abroad have reinforced my position on this.

Germans experienced the end of division and the early years of reunified Germany in a dizzying variety of ways, from the standard account of radical rupture to the sense that these events changed relatively little on a quotidian level. How did you experience this period, and how, if at all, did it shape the ways you think about the project of writing history?

Poutrus: The years from 1989 to 1994 were the hardest of my life. I hadn't seen coming the developments they ushered in, and frankly, I hadn't really wanted them to happen, either. Yes, the Wall became a symbol of constriction and of the shortcomings of the East German state, but I still believed an improved, reformed, and ultimately more democratic GDR was possible. Only a few of my friends shared this hope. Most mistrusted my optimism. Some just wanted a career and believed that any change to the system would have reduced their chances of success. Others didn't believe in real change anymore and looked for ways to leave as fast as possible. But even these friends mistrusted me because for them I was, after all, a representative of the system. In the end, all my efforts to bring about change in the GDR just ended in a deceptive limbo between trying to prevent “the worst” and trying to remain as reputable as possible in an East German society ridden with mistrust. I guess I was something of a disheartened Gorbachev follower, and so, at the end of 1989, I was quite disappointed. I was disappointed with communism, with the GDR (as a supposed alternative to West Germany), and above all with myself. In school, in the military, in the FDJ youth organization, and in the SED party, I had been taught which was the winning side of history. But, in the end, I did not belong to the prevailing side, as I had always hoped. It was a bitter lesson to admit not only that the SED Politbüro had failed but also that my hopes for a better GDR had as well. It took some time for me to accept that. This was the point of departure for my studies of the GDR. I wanted to understand what had happened to me and the country that had once been so central to my way of thinking. In my search for the reasons for the failure of socialism and the communists, though, I found no simple answers. Things were complicated, and to write about that in a plausible manner was not easy. Today, however, I am happy that I survived this time of confusion and find that my position somewhere between total failure and great success in historical scholarship is quite appropriate for me.

Morina: For me, 1989 carried both a sense of liberation and of continuity. My family had been deeply affected by the division of Germany. We had several close relatives living in the West, and the fact that we weren't able to visit them whenever we wanted was a constant source of frustration and sadness. I was told not to talk about this to anyone elsewhere outside the home. Yet, no one in my family was involved in the opposition or protest movement, as far as I know. We observed these events from afar, in a way. When the borders opened on November 9, we didn't even realize it until the next day because my parents had visitors that night, and the TV wasn't turned on. The following days and weeks were, in my memory, full of joy and pure relief. We spent a spectacular News Year's Eve, for example, at the Brandenburg Gate with our Western relatives. To this day—and I know I am repeating myself, but it's true—I know what it feels like to feel free.

In school, things rapidly turned uncertain. It was exciting and nerve-racking to watch teachers struggle to make sense of it all. I finished high school in 1994, and the only way in which the “unification crises” (Jürgen Kocka) seriously touched my life was that my parents desperately wanted me to stick with a government job training I had chosen but soon detested and wanted to quit to study history and journalism instead. We had numerous arguments about what it meant to give up job security “in such times,” but eventually I got my way and enrolled at the University of Leipzig in 1996. So, my personal memory of the momentous events of 1989–1990 has been quite stable and unambiguous, in part because, among my family and friends, the outcome of the revolution was hardly ever viewed or revisited in a negative way. Even those who struggled job-wise, moved to the West, or even got divorced never regretted that the GDR no longer existed. I think most of them understand post-unification life as an era bearing as much potential for opportunity as for hardship. It may very well be that this sense of ambivalence informs my recent work—on the political culture of Germany and the tremendous diversity of individual experiences of and perspectives on those transformative years across the caesura of 1989—in more explicit ways than I tend to realize.

Hoffmann: My family also slept through the fall of the Berlin Wall. November 9 was a Thursday. I arrived from Leipzig in the evening at my parents’ home at Alexanderplatz. (Every Friday I would attend lectures on the history of philosophy with Gerd Irrlitz at Humboldt University, an expert on Kant and Hegel with a non–party line reputation.) Friends of my parents from West Berlin joined us later that evening. They had come from the premiere of Coming Out, the first gay film in the GDR. The premiere was at the Kino International, and our apartment was next door. We talked about the large demonstration on Alexanderplatz on November 4, in which my parents had participated, and how society was finally changing in the direction of political reforms that my parents had wanted for a long time. The television was switched off. They were all drinking, smoking, and debating politics, as usual. My parents’ friends had to leave for West Berlin around 11:30 pm to cross the border at Friedrichstrasse before the cutoff time for day visits. They called after midnight to tell us that the Wall was open, but no one picked up the phone. That night, my childhood friends who had left for West Berlin crossed the border in the other direction to visit their old neighborhood and rang our doorbell downstairs, but we were asleep. In other words, I slept through history being made. The next morning, I crossed the border for the first time at Friedrichstrasse to see my friends again. To this day, I haven't gotten used to crossing the former border by S-Bahn from East to West. Recently, I asked my mother how she remembers these days. She told me that there was a performance of Beethoven's Ninth (with Schiller's “Ode to Joy”), directed by Leonard Bernstein in Berlin, airing live on the radio that Saturday morning. Alone in our apartment on the eighth floor, she opened up all the windows and turned the stereo up to full blast. “It felt as if all iron hoops were bursting all of a sudden.” The concert was actually six weeks later, on December 23, but her recollections capture precisely the elation of that moment.

After the events of 1989–1990 and the alleged “end of history,” I was fascinated by the belief, in the West, that liberal democracy is now and, by implication, always has been historically without alternative. My first two books were spurred by the unexpected revival of Enlightenment concepts such as cosmopolitanism and civil society in the 1990s. These ideas were presented at the time as something new and without a difficult past—the ultimate triumph of enlightened liberalism. For Wehler or Habermas, for example, 1989 was only a “rectifying revolution,” East Central Europe's belated arrival on the “normal” path of Western modernity and liberal democracy. This kind of liberal triumphalism sounded hollow to me, and it brushed over the much more complex and contradictory history of the Enlightenment's afterlives. This is why I felt closer to Koselleck than to Wehler, even though I've learned a lot from the latter as well. In the 1960s and 1970s, Wehler had been instrumental in republishing or translating the work of left-leaning Weimar historians such as Eckart Kehr or German-Jewish émigrés such as Hans Rosenberg to promote a social history equivalent to Habermas's version of critical theory. But Wehler's (or, for that matter, Habermas's) writings in the 1990s didn't strike me as particularly “critical.”

In recent years, Koselleck's writings on temporalities have become more important for me. It seems that we, as historians, often explain away the suddenness and unexpectedness of events or bury this abruptness in long-term narratives. In my current work, I'm interested in understanding how something that contemporaries long anticipated could still come to them as a shocking surprise. In 1989, everyone knew that the GDR was moribund, but no one imagined the abrupt collapse of the communist world. As Philip Roth put it in American Pastoral, “People think of history in the long term but history, in fact, is a very sudden thing.”

In some conspicuous ways, reunification resulted in the cannibalization or erasure of the DDR. Legally, with the Unification Treaty. Politically, with the dissolution of the SED and the collapse of the state socialist project. Culturally and topographically, the country disappeared from maps and from Germany's memory landscape. Following this erasure, cultural institutions and scholars, particularly historians (though less often historians of the former East) proceeded to reimagine, even reinvent, the DDR. Could you reflect briefly on the impact these parallel phenomena of erasure and rewriting have had on the field of modern German history written since the Wende (or the tasks facing modern German historians)?

Poutrus: I do not share this perspective of the developments in the GDR up until 1989 and in eastern Germany after 1990, especially because it neutralizes—if not leaves out—the participation of the GDR and East German population in these developments. This, for me, is both a historically and politically serious problem. This view corresponds to the widespread dissatisfaction among the people in East Germany. It is not self-explanatory, and the reasons for it are as diverse as the East itself. The citizens of the GDR experienced the so-called Wendezeit (turning point)—a term from the SED leadership; many others called it a “peaceful revolution”—in very different ways, as they did German unification. This diversity has to do with where people stood vis-à-vis the GDR, the SED dictatorship, and the communist worldview at the time. It was also related to the expectations they associated with the end of communism and with German unification and whether these expectations turned out to be realistic. At the end of the GDR, these expectations ranged from reformed communism, to a social-democratic “third way,” to liberal constitutional patriotism, to ecological renewal, to a neoliberal economic miracle, to a return to a Bismarckian nation-state, all the way to a racist national community (Volksgemeinschaft). But events often turned out quite differently than people had imagined, and these expectations went unfulfilled. Many East Germans experienced the rapid changes after 1989 as unreasonably demanding and overwhelming. That experience helps explain why many bear a grudge against the current state of affairs. But that does not answer the question of how things got to be this way nor of who is responsible. And it certainly does not explain why, for example, in the difficult 1990s, the majority of East Germans endorsed the national and state governments time and again and yet, today, so many act as if these developments were carried out without their support or participation. I think that good historical explanations for such developments must emphasize the agency of the people in the DDR and eastern Germany, even if this makes things more complicated. After all, they were complicated.

Hoffmann: One of the ironies of these erasures is that the most compelling histories of the GDR experience have been written by West German, French, or Anglophone historians. Think, for example, of the work by Sandrine Kott, Paul Betts, or Jens Gieseke. But when I try to make sense of my parents’ generation and our post-1989 lives not from an analytical and ethnographic view from the outside but as critical self-reflection from within, as postsocialist subjects, I have to turn to film (the work of Andreas Dresen, for example), theater, or novels.

In Germany, to put this more pointedly, GDR history is primarily “managed” by West German historians. I understand why this came about, and I myself didn't feel the urge to write about the GDR at all. But it seems significant that the directors of the institutes for Contemporary History in Munich, Potsdam, or Dresden, for example, are men who grew up in 1970s West Germany. In 1992, Reinhard Mohr described this generation as the Zaungäste (picket fence guests). That is, their defining experience was to have been too young for the events of 1967–1968. But they were also Zaungäste in 1989–1990, watching the transformative events in Gdansk, Leipzig, or Prague on television. Now, this generation is writing the history of the late twentieth century and, not surprisingly, they tend to dismiss the idea that 1989–1990 (or 1967–1968) was a radical rupture at all. This is markedly different from Poland or the Czech Republic, where those who grew up under late socialism are now in charge as directors of historical institutes, museums, or publishing houses and are involved in bitter political contestations about this past, including the meanings of 1968 and 1989. For me, the most interesting histories that are emerging in the moment are trying to explain the ironies of the transformations of the postsocialist years, including these appropriations of the past. I believe that the 1980s and 1990s were a transformative era not just for eastern Europe, Latin America, Southern Africa, or Asia but also for the West. What we are experiencing at the moment is the social and political fallout of these transformations on a global scale.

Morina: I am not sure I fully agree with the premise of this question. Was there really a complete “erasure” and “rewriting” of GDR memory after 1989? Rather, it seems to me, a plethora of experiences, perspectives, narratives, and memories have been articulated (in nonfiction and fiction books, memorials, TV dramas, documentaries, print and online media, movies, theater plays, art, etc.) and controversially debated over the last thirty years (think of the works of Anna Saunders, Paul Cooke, Carola Rudnick, Jonathan Bach, and many others). Surely, a great measure of cultural disenfranchisement and devaluation has occurred with regard to East Germany, even if East German themes were, at times, omnipresent, for example, in literature, film, and the political feuilleton. Yet, the region's radical transformation modeled largely after an unquestioned West German political and economic system has had severe long-term effects, many of which historians are only now beginning to examine thoroughly. Concurrently, the search for some sense of innere Einheit, year after year invoked by politicians and state representatives, has become a tragic, even pointless endeavor that, by now, is itself deserving of thorough historicizing. Thus, one of the fundamental questions facing contemporary historians is how far they can and in which ways they should strive to influence the collective self-perceptions and historical imagination of this culturally and politically peculiar landscape within the greater, unified Germany. When pioneers of the “integrated history” of postwar Germany ponder in private whether their apparent inability (or unwillingness) to write such a history for the post-1989 era has contributed to the recent re-estrangement of the East from the West and the particularly strong support for right-wing populism there, then much work remains to be done, not only in terms of post-unification historiography but also, and particularly, with regard to the complex relationship among history, memory, and political culture.

How has the disappearance of the DDR (or its reappearance as a postsocialist cultural re-creation) impacted your scholarship or, more generally, the kinds of questions historians ask?

Morina: Perhaps, in a twisted sense, certainly not in a causational line, the disappearance of the GDR—and, along with it, state socialism as a project that was supported by many more people than just 2 million SED members—has informed the central questions of my second book, Die Erfindung des Marxismus. What was the original attraction of Karl Marx's ideas? How were his works transformed into a political movement called Marxism? And what happens to the project when the quest for social justice creates new injustices, when ideal and reality, Anspruch und Wirklichkeit, grow ever more apart? The GDR's collapse and the vanishing of a worldview that I had come to know as a child as the logical happy end of history quite likely contributed to my ability to carve out a peculiar, hitherto unexplored perspective on the origins of Marxism.

In a broader sense, the recurring notion that the East “hangs in the balance” (“steht auf der Kippe,” coined by Wolfgang Thierse in 2001) has inspired a number of works on East Germany with a therapeutic or pathologizing undertone. These works aim to explain (though, in fact, often merely speculate) how current conditions might be connected to the outwardly vanished but subcutaneously prevailing authoritarian structures and mentalities of the SED-state. Yet, these frequently problematic attempts are mostly made not by historians but by psychologists, sociologists, writers, and public intellectuals (think of Hans-Joachim Maaz and Ines Geipel as the most prominent ones)—which suggests that historians, with their expertise, should take up these questions more often and proactively than previously.

Poutrus: Indeed, my prescholarly experiences have significantly influenced my professional interests. The clearer this became to me, the less willing I was to let myself be boxed into a collective belonging as a former communist, GDR citizen, or East German, whether in political conflicts or in my scholarly work. The fact that, again and again, certain scholars, journalists, and politicians promote the idea of a uniform East German identity just shows how ambivalent questions of identity are. Who I am, who I identify with, and whether my identity is recognized publicly by the state, by its institutions, and by my fellow citizens—whether I know them or not: these issues all depend on many constantly changing factors. Precisely for this reason, it is rather paradoxical to want to make of these individual, dynamic processes a definable and above all collective matter. Considering my own experiences in the GDR as well as what we know about the history of the twentieth century, I can only warn against attaching more importance to group norms than to individual rights and liberties. In this sense, I am happy that I survived the GDR, and I would not want to return to its identity-defining collectivism—neither in my daily life, nor in my political opinions, nor in my scholarly work.

Hoffmann: My father was proud that he didn't write a single line about the GDR, and for a long time I felt the same way. Still, growing up in the GDR and experiencing the transformations of the late 1980s and 1990s certainly shaped my thinking about history. Like many of my friends, I didn't identify with the GDR when I grew up, and I don't consider myself “East German.” Rather, I'd describe our identity (if there is such a thing) as “postsocialist.” We grew up in the shadow of the postwar dreams and delusions of our parents’ generation, and although we perhaps did not share these dreams and delusions as young adults in the late 1980s, we do feel the tragedy of that generation. All the conflicts we had with our parents ended in the moment when their lives were so visibly in tatters. They were screwed over twice, first by state socialist realities and then by liberal capitalist realities (actually three times, since their childhoods were consumed by Nazism and world war). I guess that's why we like the elegiac comedy Good Bye, Lenin! and not the Stasi-kitsch of The Lives of Others.

Of course, there is also a considerable amount of continuity in my life, despite disappearance and displacement. I always had a home in Berlin: first my parents’ apartment at Alexanderplatz, then for almost twenty years in Schöneberg in the West (despite unification, I still felt the urge to leave the GDR and move to West Berlin), and since I left for Berkeley again in the neighborhood where I grew up. In other words, Berlin has remained a constant, even though the city has changed profoundly. My neighborhood is now popular among global hipsters, and hardly anyone whose family lived there before 1989 still has a place in Mitte or Prenzlauer Berg. Of course, this kind of simultaneity of different layers of time in one city, of displacements in one and the same place, is something that interests me as a historian.

With increasing distance from the fall of the Wall and reunification, one important historiographical trend has been to think across the watershed moment of 1989–1990 (or 1989–1991). What value or risks do you see in the decentering of this moment of rupture? What vistas does this tendency open up or close off?

Morina: It is a crucial and tremendously meaningful shift in focus. It enables us to observe long-term and transnationally relevant political, economic, social, and cultural developments, such as the rise of the neoliberal paradigm, the impact of dissident and new social movements on both dictatorial and parliamentary systems, the ambivalent—liberating and illiberal—effects of national self-determination, or the fading of liberal democracy's spell as a universal promise. In my current work, Geteilte Bilanz, a political-cultural history of Germany since the 1980s, I use ego-documents to explore how ordinary men and women in East and West Germany perceived themselves as citizens; how they understood concepts such as democracy, the state, equality, and security; and what they considered as fair and effective processes of political participation and representation. One of my hypotheses is that both societies were highly politicized in the 1980s, albeit in very different ways and within antagonistic transnational contexts, and that the still prevalent political-cultural divide between East and West Germany is largely rooted in diverse understandings, expectations, and practices of democracy. By considering both stories as interrelated and interdependent—and ultimately as one story within a wider European and global moment of massive sociopolitical change—the book is intended to provide an integrated perspective on the history of unified Germany.

Poutrus: I think that the value of portrayals of upheavals such as those of 1989–1990 lies in taking the perspectives of historical witnesses seriously. The narrative of a life before and after such events is relevant and influential up through the present. Nevertheless, the danger of fixating on such events is that they cannot be explained through historical scholarship if they are mystically inflated. They can only be illustrated. At the same time, there is the risk of representing the people who were affected in one way or another not as responsible actors but rather as passive particles floating along the stream of history. This representation would eliminate the critical-explanatory function of historical scholarship, turning it instead into a discipline of legitimacy as it was in the period of dictatorship and imperialism.

Hoffmann: As with any other historical event, your viewpoint depends on where you were in 1989–1990. For most of my friends in Bremen, Freiburg, or Zehlendorf, 1989–1990 was a non-event or a nuisance. After the “Wende” (turning point) of 1982, it seemed that a leftist SPD-Green coalition was destined to end the Kohl era in the next election. Instead, German unification gave Kohl and the Christian-Democrats a new lease on life. We use “Wende” to describe the events of 1989 even though the term was first used by Kohl's 1982 election campaign (as “geistig-moralische Wende,” West Germany's version of neoconservative “family values”) and then in October 1989 by Communist Party reformers in an attempt to contain what started out as a democratic revolution. For many West Germans, 1989–1990 also felt like a nationalist return of the German “East,” even though historically it doesn't get much more Central German than Weimar, Leipzig, or Dresden or Central European than Prague, Budapest, and Warsaw. My West Berlin friends felt emotionally closer to Paris, London, or Los Angeles than to the “East,” which for them began at Friedrichstrasse.

For my family or my “postsocialist” friends, the late 1980s and early 1990s was a radical transformative experience. For us, 1989–1990 changed everything. Again, the experience depended on where you were. In Belgrade and Moscow, it marked the beginning of civil war and state collapse. In Warsaw and Prague, 1989–1990 meant the regaining of democratic self-governance and civic pride. Even within circles of friends or family, these experiences were different depending on age. For those who were only starting out with their adult lives like myself, 1989–1990 opened many doors. For those who were older, it derailed their careers and lives, at least for some time. My mother, who in 1990 was about my age now, first lost her job but ultimately maintained her position as one of Germany's leading experts on children's theater. My father, on the other hand, despite a positive evaluation (by a West German academic commission that included Jürgen Kocka) was forced into early retirement to make room for West Germans who took over the Academy of Arts. At the top, Walter Jens, a rhetoric professor from Tübingen, who is now mainly remembered for having downplayed his Nazi past, replaced Heiner Müller, one the most important German writers of the late twentieth century. As a farewell, Müller sent a letter to my father and all the Mitarbeiter at the Academy (on May 1, 1993, and on the Academy's old GDR letterhead) with two melodramatic lines: “Denken ist grundsätzlich schuldhaft/Das Böse ist die Zukunft” (Thinking is inherently culpable/The future belongs to evil). This was for him the historical implication of 1989, of the failed experiment with an anticapitalist and antifascist German state after Hitler. Like my father, he died only a few years later at the age of sixty-six.

These kind of displacements happened everywhere in the former GDR but especially at universities and in disciplines like history or philosophy, which were at the core of Marxist ideology. West German historians who didn't get a position in the West now ended up at purged history departments in Dresden, Leipzig, or Halle. The late Alf Lüdtke or Heinz Dieter Kittsteiner, for example, finally did get professorships at new universities in Erfurt or Frankfurt/Oder. But with these brilliant outsiders also came much West German mediocrity. Again, at the time I preferred to read Wehler and Koselleck or Lüdtke and Kittsteiner than GDR historians, who were mostly paralyzed first by late socialism and then by the events of 1989–1990. Eugen Ruge's portrait of his father, the historian Wolfgang Ruge, in Times of Fading Light captures this paralysis well. This experience does not explain, however, why thirty years later the postsocialist generation of “East Germans” is more or less absent from tenured positions in history departmentsFootnote ² or from the German educated elite more generally, including top positions at academies and institutes, publishing houses, or the feuilleton of quality newspapers such as Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Süddeutsche Zeitung, or Die Zeit. Two years ago, I was a fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg Berlin, one of Germany's finest academic institutions. Over the years, there have been only two or three “East Germans” among the few hundred fellows from Germany and all over the world, including academics of my generation from East Central Europe, Russia, or China. The only “East Germans” I encountered at the Wiko were working behind the kitchen counter.

What is the most important question facing historians of modern Germany today?

Hoffmann: One of the questions I think about a lot is what German history has to teach our undergraduates here in Berkeley or anywhere else in the world. This is a generation that grew up after 9/11 in a world of endless wars, enormous inequalities, looming environmental disasters, and other ruins of neoliberalism. There is a certain irony in the fact that we “globalized” German history in the last ten or twenty years, for example, by paying more attention to the histories of German colonialism; the global flow of capital, people, and commodities; or East and West German engagement with the “third world.” All of this new and exciting work is an important corrective to the kind of self-centered national histories of the 1980s and 1990s à la Wehler and Nipperdey (or Pierre Nora's Lieux de Mémoire). But the more we embed German history in the world, the less obvious it is, I think, to undergraduates outside of Germany what is particularly unique and urgent about this past. It also troubles me that the kind of fine-grained histories of one particular time or place (think of Carl Schorske's Fin-de-siècle Vienna, Detlev Peukert's Weimar Republic or Dagmar Herzog's Sex after Fascism) are disappearing from our reading lists. What is it, then, that our students with their diverse backgrounds can learn in our twenty-first-century volatile and unequal world from specifically German experiences, for example, with social democracy and the welfare state, its promises and perils? I live in the Bay Area, one of the richest pockets of the world, home of the global tech companies that are propelling us into a post-industrial future. Yet, if I walk around downtown San Francisco, I find myself suddenly in a parallel universe of homelessness, abject poverty, and human misery that is hard to stomach. It feels like 1870 all over again, just with iPhones, Uber, and Google.

Morina: Impossible to say. There are many, and it depends on how and who defines “important.” As far as the general field of contemporary history is concerned, I wonder what the shift in focus from the history of Nazi Germany—long the central field of inquiry for historians of modern Germany—to the postwar period means for our understanding of the Second World War and the Holocaust (and, concurrently, their relevance to the wider public). With an eye on East Germany, it remains one of the most formidable challenges to write a Gesellschaftsgeschichte of the GDR that offers a nuanced understanding of the social basis of socialism beyond the mere use of force and in a decidedly transnational perspective, which connects it as much to West German history as to developments in the rest of (eastern) Europe.

Poutrus: I don't think that there is just one, but for me one of the most pertinent is how to take a critical stance on the developments after the German unification of 1990 without romanticizing the failed SED state (and how to get external funding for that).