By engaging with what she calls the forgotten inheritance of the East German autumn of 1989, Anke Pinkert's Remembering 1989 offers a strikingly original reinterpretation of what is commonly referred to as the Peaceful Revolution (Friedliche Revolution). Rather than rehearsing familiar narratives centered on the defeat of socialism and the triumphant consolidation of neoliberal capitalism, Pinkert reconstructs the autumn of 1989 as a moment of radical openness—a social promise propelled by civic courage and collective imagination. The transformative events that unfolded across the towns and cities of the GDR: in streets, churches, factories, and public squares, briefly turned citizens’ initiatives, newly formed political parties, roundtables, workers’ councils, and various forms of solidaric community (Gemeinwesen) into laboratories in which alternative futures became tangible.

The book asks a deceptively simple question: why have the traces of this emancipatory energy largely vanished from German public memory in the decades since? Pinkert's answer unfolds through a counter-archival practice. Drawing on close readings of film, literature, photography, and memorial installations, she explores how the democratic potentialities of 1989 have indeed been documented and commemorated—but often in small-scale, scattered, and stubbornly subversive initiatives. In doing so, she not only challenges dominant interpretations of Germany's recent past and offers insights into why the AfD has been able, at least rhetorically, to appropriate the legacy of 1989, but also invites broader reflection on the fate of emancipatory moments and the fraught relationship between collective remembering and forgetting.

The volume consists of five substantial chapters. Chapter one demonstrates how the inheritance of 1989 was gradually overwritten in Berlin's public space. Through an attentive analysis of urban transformation and memory politics, Pinkert shows how the revolutionary rupture gave way to narratives of a “peaceful revolution” culminating in national unification—frameworks that foregrounded state-centered transition while sidelining the more unruly and experimental dimensions of the revolution. Particularly thought-provoking are her reflections on the post-1989 consolidation of the GDR's image as the “second German dictatorship” and an Unrechtsstaat, that is, a state governed by injustice or lacking the rule of law. To be sure, Pinkert does not deny the repressive nature of the regime; rather, she questions how this framing has narrowed the interpretive space for understanding 1989 as a contingent and creative political break rather than merely a prelude to unification.

The following chapters develop a series of case studies that exemplify Pinkert's method: she interprets cultural artifacts by situating them within a broader politics of archival control, affective attachment, and mnemonic authority. Chapter two turns to Leipzig, where local initiatives and grassroots commemorative practices provide a different vantage point. Here Pinkert reconstructs alternative readings of the events of 1989 that foreground civic engagement and democratic experimentation instead of teleological closure. The city that once served as the epicenter of the Monday demonstrations emerges as a laboratory of memory in which competing narratives continue to be negotiated. Chapter 3 offers a compelling reading of the relatively little-known documentary Karl-Marx City (2017) by the German American artist duo Petra Epperlein and Michael Tucker. The film reclaims family memory from the bureaucratic mnemonic management of the Stasi Records Agency, probing the entanglement of private recollection and state archival authority. Chapter 4 is devoted to Thomas Heise's Material (2009), a film assembling footage shot in the final years of the GDR and the early post-1989 period. Pinkert reads Heise's montage as a refusal of narrative closure and as an attempt to preserve the dissonant temporality of revolutionary expectation—an archive of unrest that resists retrospective smoothing.

Arguably, the most inspiring section of the book is Chapter five which analyzes the 2018 German Turkish photo exhibition BİZİM BERLİN 89/90, featuring the work of Turkish photographer Ergun Çağatay (1937–2018). By foregrounding Turkish German encounters, Pinkert unsettles the ethnically homogeneous imaginary that often frames 1989. The exhibition brings to light an intersectional and vernacular dimension of the events that has remained largely invisible in national narratives and was later overshadowed by the disturbing images of racially motivated violence in the early 1990s. In doing so, Pinkert not only provincializes dominant memory discourses but also expands the very notion of the revolutionary public.

Conceptually, the book revolves around a productive tension between public memory and what Pinkert calls the memory of publics—the recollections and imaginaries generated within ephemeral communities of protest. Theoretically, Remembering 1989 draws on a wide range of thinkers. The book engages Hannah Arendt's reflections on revolution, Jacques Derrida's meditations on archives and spectral history, critiques of neoliberalism by Wendy Brown and Susan Buck-Morss, Ariella Azoulay's notion of “potential history” and strands of memory studies represented by Michael Rothberg and Anne Rigney, among others, which foreground futurity. Central to Pinkert's argument is the idea of “archival futurity”: archives are not merely repositories of what has been but infrastructures that shape what might yet become (25–29). Her “future archives” are thus repositories not only of what was but of what might have been—and perhaps still could be.

The prose is elegant and at times lyrical. Pinkert interweaves autobiographical reflection—she was born in 1968, grew up in East Berlin, experienced 1989 in Leipzig, and emigrated to the United States in the early 1990s—with sustained scholarly analysis. This positioning never feels self-indulgent; rather, it underscores what is at stake in writing about a past that is both historically consequential and personally formative. Her situated voice enhances the book's central concern with memory, perspective, and archival mediation. Each chapter can be read independently, as Pinkert carefully restates her conceptual premises and situates her case studies within the broader architecture of the argument, making the volume accessible even to readers who may approach it selectively.

If one minor reservation remains, it concerns the treatment of the ecological imaginary of 1989. In the introduction, Pinkert foregrounds environmental concern as a significant component of late GDR dissent, thereby raising the expectation that this strand will assume a more prominent place in the chapters that follow. Yet this promise is only partially realized. The ecological dimension surfaces intermittently and suggestively, but it is not developed with the same analytical depth as the other case studies. Given the book's overarching interest in alternative political trajectories—and its recurring references to the polycrisis of our present—a more sustained engagement with ecological visions might have further enriched its exploration of suppressed possibilities and added another layer to its reflection on the afterlives of protest.

Remembering 1989 is more than a contribution to the historiography of late socialism in Central Europe. It is an intervention in how we conceptualize political rupture, archival practice, and democratic possibility. By treating 1989 not as a closed chapter but as a reservoir of unrealized futures, Pinkert challenges both historians and memory scholars to reconsider the temporal orientation of their fields. In an era marked by democratic fatigue and resurgent authoritarianism, her insistence on the unfinished character of emancipatory moments will likely resonate far beyond the German case.