Brockmann’s new book, The Freest Country in the World: East Germany’s Final Year in Culture and Memory, provides an exciting contribution to the ongoing debate on Ostalgia and on what is remembered of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) more broadly. Brockmann starts with the premise that much of the ongoing nostalgia for the GDR is not so much rooted in a longing for an authoritarian regime but rather in the spirit and promises held during the very last year of the GDR’s existence between November 1989 and October 1990. What is more, he asserts that—in large part due to this—“a primary reason for the controversies and schisms surrounding GDR memory in the reunified state lies in the question of precisely which GDR is being remembered in East and West” (p. 6). In other words, whereas the West is most likely to remember the GDR as an authoritarian surveillance state, many East Germans foster positive memories of the GDR precisely because, so Brockmann’s argument goes, their memories include the period between fall 1989 and fall 1990 which they consider a time of freedom from both an authoritarian system and the constraints placed upon them by a capitalist state. Brockmann explains that these positive memories of the disappearing GDR have been “shunted aside” (p. 4) by the West, thus leaving them in large part to the communicative (personal) memory of East Germans, whereas German cultural (collective) memory, and with it the more accepted narrative about the GDR, tends to be shaped by the West.

In seven chapters, Brockmann traces cultural representations of the final year of the GDR that both zoom in on the events of the time and complicate the image of the Easterners as people trapped in an authoritarian state that was freed by the West through German reunification. The first three chapters analyze documentaries, punk culture, and neo-Nazism and provide a detailed account of archival materials created during the period from 1989 to 90. As the book progresses to novels, fiction films, and finally the question of commemorative culture in the form of a reunification memorial, the making of the materials Brockmann consults also begins to move further away from the years 1989 to 90. In addition to the depth which Brockmann’s analysis provides in each chapter, this approach in itself, I found, delivers a compelling methodological arc that traces the ways in which meanings around the GDR and German reunification have shifted not only between Westerners and Easterners but also over time. The book impresses by its nuanced approach to GDR memory that resists the temptation to think of the GDR purely in comparison to the “West” or the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG). Instead, through thorough archival work and media analysis, Brockmann manages to portray the last year of the GDR as its own political and cultural entity that represents an exciting alternative to both the FRG and the GDR prior to October 1989.

While I found every chapter equally enjoyable to read, the chapter titled Anarchy in the GDR, which discusses the GDR’s punk scene, illustrates best Brockmann’s use of materials to make his case. The author’s focus on the final year of the GDR allows him to show how punk, as a subculture that embraces nonconformity, represents one example of an alternative path to reunification. Whereas in the West, punk culture typically rebelled against capitalist structures, punk in the GDR tended to be more of a rebellion against an authoritarian state that limited individual choices. However, this did not mean that the GDR’s punk culture embraced the version of individualism that came with German reunification and the capitalist system attached to it. Instead, Brockmann writes about an incident of punks in the East German town of Leipzig marching in the opposite direction of the protestors demanding German reunification in “ongoing support for anarchism and democratic socialism, as well as opposition to nationalism and capitalism” (p. 111). It is precisely this fight for the creation—and the loss—of alternative spaces to both the GDR as it existed up until 1989 and the FRG that Brockmann describes so skillfully, and that postcolonial scholar Homi K. Bhabba found in “in-between” spaces that “innovate and interrupt the performance of the present” (Location of Culture [2004], p.10).

What The Freest Country in the World accomplishes is to show not only how various media and subcultures have disrupted the time period from 1989 to 1990 but also how, by cracking open a space between GDR and FRG, the alternative spaces then become “interventions in the here and now” (ibid) that affect narratives and actual realities in contemporary Germany. This can be seen in examples of built spaces, such as the Tuntenhaus which, as Brockmann shows, is a space that originates in the squatting scene from 1989 to 90 and that still exists (and continues to fight for its existence). But it can also be felt by the reader who is reminded that German reunification was not inevitable and that the last year of the GDR represents “a sense of unfinished business, of possibilities and promises that might have been available to the world at one point, but that were foreshortened and foreclosed” (p. 300).