Image & Narrative, Vol 12, No2 (2011) 83 The Lives of Others: re-remembering the German Democratic Republic.
Margaret Montgomerie & Anne-Kathrin Reck
Abstract: In the period since the popular uprising of 1989, the fall of the Berlin Wall and the re-unification of Germany, a range of representations of the GDR have emerged and gained popularity with audiences in the former GDR and the West. This article will investigate the ways in which three films, Good bye Lenin! (Becker, 2003, Germany) , The Lives of Others (von Donnersmarck, 2006, Germany) and Mrs Ratcliffe’s Revolution (Eltringham, 2007, UK) recall the East German past, invoking memories, or the sense of memory, through an articulation of the detail of the everyday lives of ordinary people. These films are immersed in the discursive practices associated with ‘Ostalgie’, a term coined to characterise the critical, often humorous nostalgia for the life and style of the former East. The article will also explore the use of references to state coercion and surveillance which draws on a set of representational tropes and which continue the West’s Cold War representation of the paranoid and intrusively watchful state.
Résumé: Depuis le soulèvement populaire de 1989, la chute du Mur de Berlin et la réunification de l'Allemagne, toute une série de représentations culturelles de la RDA sont devenues très populaires, tant à l'Ouest qua dans l'ex-RDA. Cet article analyse la manière dont trois films, Good bye Lenin! (Becker, 2003, Allemagne) , La vie des autres (von Donnersmarck, 2006, Allemagne) et Mrs Ratcliffe’s Revolution (Eltringham, 2007, GB), évoquent les souvenirs de l'Allemagne de l'Est et comment la mémoire (ou le sentiment de la mémoire) s'articule à la mise en scène de certains détails de la vie quotidienne de gens ordinaires. Ces films plongent dans les discours nostalgiques associés au concept d' "ostalgie", une forme de nostalgie critique et souvent empreinte d'humour de la vie et du style de l'ex-RDA. Cet article analyse aussi la représentation des contraintes et de la surveillance exercées par l'État, qui prolongent un imaginaire venu de l'époque de la Guerre froide et de ses idées sur un appareil d'État paranoïde et obsédé de contrôle social.
Key Words: ‘Ostalgie’/ nostalgia for East Germany, film, collective, cultural, surveillance state
Image & Narrative, Vol 12, No2 (2011) 84 Memory, narrative and the lives of others
Maurice Halbwachs, in his work on collective memory, argues that memory is social and discursive rather than individual.
Most of the time, when I remember, it is others who spur me on; their memory comes to the aid of mine and mine relies on theirs. [...] There is no point in seeking where they [memories] are preserved in my brain or in some nook of my mind to which I alone have access: for they are recalled to me externally, and the groups of which I am a part give me my means to reconstruct them, upon condition to be sure that I turn toward them and adopt, at least for the moment their way of thinking. (Halbwachs: 1992:38)
Halbwachs goes on to argue that memory is anchored in a sense of identity, place and things as material culture. When people are removed from a place and have no-one to remind them of it Halbwachs suggests that they lose the ability to recall the past that occurred there. Mass media narratives provide a public space for the discursive enactment of memory, whether of actual events and experiences or of other fictional narratives. The technology of screen narratives allows for the reproduction of ‘lost space’ through what Kuleshov described as ‘creative geography’, the creation of the effect of a coherent space through the editing together of images of potentially unconnected places. This same technique can be used to re-instate buildings and localities. Through such techniques screen narratives provide a space for the mulling over of and, following Halbwachs’ logic, the evocation/production of collective memories.
Narratives invariably invite us to vicariously experience the ‘lives of others’. They present the world, events and actions to us as either unseen voyeurs, listeners or readers or through the eyes and words of characters, or a combination of both. The ‘others’ who populate the narratives may be from any period of actual or imagined history, the present or the future. They may occupy a familiar world, one which is physically or culturally distinct, or an alternative dimension in time or space. The ‘otherness’ of such characters may be just that they are ‘not me’ but are familiar in every other way, or that we perceive their difference as fundamental and disturbing. As Naficy and Gabriel argue: ‘The other is disorder’ (1993: xi). That is to suggest that the ‘otherness’ of characters is understood in relation to how ‘like me’ or not they are. This ‘likeness’ and ‘otherness’ will in part result from whether we share a common experience of the past. The more unfamiliar ‘the others’ and their world are the
Image & Narrative, Vol 12, No2 (2011) 85 more likely it is that their differences will provoke anxiety and they will be perceived as ‘out of order’, as representations of disorder. Disorder is essential to narrative; without disorder we have no story. However, conventionally disorder is made orderly through the resolution of the narrative. Our role as audience in identifying with or objectifying and distancing ourselves from such ‘others’ is implied through the formal and structural qualities of the narrative from the point(s) of view that we are offered and the pleasures and traumas that we are invited to share. Narrative and visual point of view in cinema are discursively subject to economic and institutional pressures. Minority, oppositional or discredited life experiences, world views and memories are either structurally absent from representation or they are liable to be narrativised in ways which exploit their otherness. East Germans who were citizens of the GDR have been invited to forget their past. The traces of the physical spaces that they inhabited, the communist regime which structured their lives, the modernist architecture, products and experiences of the GDR seem to have been relegated from the collective memory of the unified Germany.
Huyssen (1995) describes ‘cultural memory’ as a shared rather than individual category of remembering. Cultural memory, like any other kind of social discourse, is a site of struggles for dominance and minority rights. The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 led the way to the reunification of Germany one year later. This reiteration of well-known facts disguises the complexities of the relationships between East and West Germany and papers over the cracks of inequality. The experiences and worldviews of those who grew up in the East and who through their civil resistance discredited, undermined and toppled the Communist regime seem to have been turned into second class memories conquered and displaced by the capitalist West. As Huyssen goes on to argue, in the era of global postmodernism cultural memory ‘can no longer be safely secured along the traditional axes of nation and race, language and national history’ (1995: 9). The GDR no longer exists geographically or legally and the remnants of the official culture have been swept away in the name of progress and democracy. In this context it has been convincingly argued by Blum (2004:196), Graham Westphal (2005) and Boym (2001) that items of material culture, such as the East German pedestrian traffic signals ‘Ampelmännchen’, have obtained a new symbolic significance and have been re-imagined as ‘resistance fighter(s) against urban homogenization’. The jaunty figure of the Ampelmännchen’ in his hat signalling the danger or safety of the road for pedestrians becomes a tangible reminder of 40 years of separation; of 40 years when East Germans mattered. Like red pillar boxes in Britain, the Ampelmännchen implies a cultural
Image & Narrative, Vol 12, No2 (2011) 86 history and uniqueness which may well be contradicted by the presence of global brands, such as McDonalds, KFC, in city centres throughout the world. They are mementos which allow people to re-imagine the past of Berlin, Dresden, Leipzig, as part of the GDR.
Articulating the past, history and emotion
Huyssen maintains that ‘the past must be articulated to become memory’ (1995: 10). Films such as Good Bye Lenin!, The Lives of Others and Mrs Ratcliffe’s Revolution articulate the East German past, invoking memories (or the sense of memory for the vicarious viewer) through attention to the details of the everyday lives of ordinary people as well as the mobilization of existing stereotypes of the Cold War and the totalitarian state drawn from popular culture. These signs of the past are demonstrated through a number of narrative and cinematic techniques. In all of the films the unfolding events are historically placed by overt narration. Both Good Bye Lenin! and Mrs Ratcliffe’s Revolution begin with a voice-over of a character introducing the other main characters and the context, whilst The Lives of Others is prefaced by captions viewed in silence indicating the role of the Stasi in controlling the East German population. A key difference is evident here which sets the tone for the movies. Both Good Bye Lenin! and Mrs Ratcliffe’s Revolution immediately invite us into quirky personal and family experiences of the GDR. In contrast the opening of The Lives of Others keeps us at a distance by initially providing official facts and figures for serious contemplation. When we meet Wiesler, a Stasi Officer in The Lives of Others, we are introduced to him as a state interrogator rather than as a private individual. However, by the end of all three films the initial accounts of characters and their understandings of their situations have been transformed.
According to Boym ‘[o]ne remembers best what is coloured by emotion. Moreover, in the emotional topography of memory, personal and historical events tend to be conflated’ (2001:52). Her words are particularly pertinent to popular cinema designed for mass audiences where there is a symbiotic relationship between the representations of personal memory and historic events. Autobiography, whether actual or fictional, is validated by historical events. Historical events are made consumable and popularised through autobiography; or as Warnock states ‘memory and personal identity are inextricably linked’(1987: 75). The stories related by Alex (Good Bye Lenin!) and Mary (Mrs Ratcliffe’s Revolution) both conform to this prescription.
Image & Narrative, Vol 12, No2 (2011) 87 In Good Bye Lenin! Alex relates his understanding of the events which shaped his life. The credit sequence montage draws out the distinctiveness of East Berlin: modernist buildings, monuments to Communist notables, empty streets and car parks sparsely populated with small cars, images of cosmonauts and a rotating statue of Lenin. All these elements of mise en scène are depicted in muted colours tempered by the red of political banners. We are then invited into the nostalgic idyll of Alex’s last memories of his father. Through family film footage we see Alex and his sister Ariane playing in a garden whilst being filmed by their father whose voice can be heard in the background. Unlike the imagery in the credits sequence this footage could equally be a scene from any depiction of Western family life. The narrative then returns to Alex’s GDR located memory. The first significant day he remembers is marked by the coincidence of Sigmund Jähn’s launch into space as a member of the Soyuz 31 space mission on August 26th 1978 and the Stasi’s visit to Alex’s home (to question his mother about the disappearance of his father whilst on official business in the West). Alex comments ‘We were world class. East German citizen Sigmund Jähn, was the first German in Space.’ and ‘While Sigmund Jähn was intrepidly representing our country in space my father was getting his brains fucked out by his new ‘enemy of the state’ girlfriend.’ Here Alex’s memory aligns excitement and pride in the achievements of the GDR with the impact of his father’s actions. The pain of the adult world of relationships is starkly contrasted to the television scenes from the Soyuz space craft where ‘Mascha’ (a Soviet doll) is married to ‘Sandmann’, the eponymous hero of Sandmännchen (a children’s animated TV series, discussed in greater detail below).
The second significant day for our hero Alex is the 7th October 1989, the 40th anniversary of the GDR; another historic day of momentous political and personal events. It is the day that Gorbachev visited Berlin for what was to be the final celebration of the Communist state. For Alex it is the day that he joins protestors, meets Lara (his future love) and is arrested. It is also the day that his mother on her way to a state function, witnesses police brutality and the arrest of her son and subsequently has her first heart attack which results in a coma. The final coincidence of historic collective and personal familial memory in the film is the death of Alex’s mother three days after the reunification of Germany in 1990.
The opening voice-over of Mrs Ratcliffe’s Revolution is provided by 11-year-old Mary. Her narrative interlinks international political history with the local and the family. Her opening idealistic words about love and justice are accompanied by images of mundane reality.
Image & Narrative, Vol 12, No2 (2011) 88 Images of Mary’s school days in Bingley, Yorkshire, segue into a scene of her wearing an anti-Vietnam war tee shirt on the sports field shouting ‘No, No. We will not go.’ We then cut to Mary presenting a speech to her teacher and classmates where she indicates that 1968 is a year of social and political struggle, civil rights in America and the student revolution in Paris. She is then interrupted and told to return to the topic ‘My Family’. Mary reluctantly introduces her father (FR), older sister (Alex) and uncle (Philip), forgetting her mother (Doreen) and concluding that: ‘There is only one family that matters, and that is the international family of communism, which has room for everyone; except Alex’.
This tension between the political and the personal, Mary forgetting to mention her mother and her preference for the ‘international family of communism’ over her biological family, provides the central problematic of Mrs Ratcliffe’s Revolution. 1968 is important because Frank, ‘FR’ Ratcliffe is a communist who has applied to take his family to the GDR. Mary is his keenest supporter. She sells the ‘Morning Star’ whilst he lectures in the street from a soap box. Once they have moved to the GDR, the family become aware that life in a communist state is not entirely unproblematic. Alex listens to American Forces radio and hears news of the Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia. This news coincides with her attempts to establish an alternative avant-garde art scene in the town of Asche, introducing her abstract art and Jimi Hendrix records to her class mates and teachers. Her teachers reject her offerings as decadent, dangerous and Western. Alex’s attempt to hold a ‘happening’ as a form of cultural resistance in a deserted factory leads her to stumble on the plans of the local youth to organise a protest when the GDR Head of State visits Asche. Later FR, who has tried to maintain his support of the communist state, hears the news that Soviet tanks have entered Prague. These news items coincide with the family’s increasing disillusionment with life in the GDR, with Mary’s eventual realisation that her biological family mean more to her than ‘the international family of communism’ as experienced in the GDR, and with Mrs Ratcliffe’s personal revolution, her emergence as a powerful and effective person in her own right.
Historical memory is articulated narratively through personal and familial experiences in entertainment cinema. This is demonstrated through Mrs Ratcliffe’s Revolution and Good Bye Lenin! set in 1968 and 1989 respectively, two of the most significant years for the Eastern Bloc. The impact of military, ideological, economic, cultural and political factors is communicated through the personal and emotional experiences of individuals. The memories
Image & Narrative, Vol 12, No2 (2011) 89 which structure the narrative work towards the self realisation of the characters as family members. The Lives of Others provides a different mode of articulation.
Stolen memory
Initially the narration of The Lives of Others is not so clearly grounded in a personal account of memories of life in the GDR, nor is it related to particularly significant historical events. The opening captions provide institutional rather than individual details indicating the all pervasive role of the Stasi in everyday GDR life and the enormous number of official Stasi employees (c. 100,000) and informants (c. 200,000). The opening captions have informed us that the goal of the Stasi is ‘to know everything’.
Wiesler, the Stasi Officer, is for most of the film our main point of view. His surveillance provides us with knowledge and images of ‘the others’. However, we are not invited to identify with him although we are complicit in his voyeurism. Like Harry Caul in The Conversation (Coppola: 1974), he is a surveillance expert who controls all aspects of his life, living in sparse private and isolated conditions where work is all consuming. Our introduction to Wiesler is as an unemotional functionary who has worked out how to ‘break’ suspects and believes he knows how to measure the truth of a statement. He embodies the Stasi ethos of ‘knowledge is power’ in every aspect of his life. Wiesler, for example, is keeping records of any Stasi students who ask questions in lectures. He does not sit at the officers’ table in the canteen but at the staff table so that he can spy on his colleagues whilst eating. A further example of this is when the Stasi ‘bug’ the artist Dreyman’s flat. Wiesler senses a neighbour watching. He manages to coerce her into opening her door. He then names her daughter and indicates that her university career will be finished if anything is mentioned about the clandestine activities she has witnessed. This observation of the minutiae of everyday life would have a chilling resonance for many GDR citizens who read their Stasi files when they became available to find out that everything down to how often they cleaned the windows had been recorded. For audiences who did not directly experience the GDR, the film might well work as Sayre (1982: 25) argues of cold war films ‘... as hidden memories of a decade – directly or indirectly’ summoning up ‘the nightmares and daydreams that drifted through segments of our society’. The address of the film and the year the story is set in, 1984 - the era of Reagan and Thatcher in the West and the acceleration of the nuclear arms race both sides of the Iron Curtain - remind us of other stories of totalitarian police states and political intrigue. Those nightmares also relate to the CIA, GCHQ or a whole variety of other covert
Image & Narrative, Vol 12, No2 (2011) 90 surveillance operations which in the name of the security of the state invade the private lives of citizens.
The invocation of the memory of the invasiveness of the Stasi also features in Good Bye Lenin! and in Mrs Ratcliffe’s Revolution. In Good Bye Lenin! it is two Stasi officers who bring the news of the defection of Alex’s father which precipitates his mother’s depression. Later it is a Stasi officer who prevents Alex from rushing to his mother’s side when she collapses. Although the appearance of the Stasi in the film is comparatively minimal it is dramatically significant for the narrative and Alex’s mother. She is a committed upholder of the state who, it becomes apparent, chose not to follow her husband to the West. Despite this attitude her commitment to each appearance of the Stasi threatens her wellbeing.
In Mrs Ratcliffe’s Revolution the Stasi and surveillance play a more significant role. When Doreen Ratcliffe inadvertently helps the School Principal’s son, Otto, to defect the Stasi arrest the Principal and ransack his home and office. Mrs Ratcliffe’s Uncle Philip is arrested for taking ‘artistic’ photographs of buildings. Willy Wolpert, a Stasi officer, blackmails Doreen into helping him defect and takes the escape route she has organised for her family. More insidiously, the culture of surveillance begins to split the family and invade their home. Mary is recruited by Frau Unger from ‘The League of Friends’ to spy on her family and FR is forced to agree to spy to make amends for his daughter Alex’s decadent behaviour. Doreen finds out that her husband is a spy and that her home is ‘wired’.
The scene, in Mrs Ratcliffe’s Revolution, where Doreen accidently pulls a plug off the wall to reveal a listening device mirrors a scene in The Lives of Others in which Dreyman, who was convinced that his apartment was not bugged, learns after re-unification from Hempf, a party official, that he was wrong. Hempf admits that he had commissioned an invasive surveillance campaign against Dreyman in an attempt to procure Dreyman’s girlfriend Christa. Hempf adds insult to injury, revealing that every part of the apartment including the bedroom was bugged. ‘We knew everything. We knew you couldn’t give little Christa what she wanted’. Dreyman returns home and begins to unravel meters of wire which intrude into every room including the bedroom. The unravelling of the wire marks the unravelling of the version of events as he had understood and remembered them. Ironically, in the resolution of the narrative the evidence of the wire and subsequently the Stasi records reveal the emergence of Wiesler’s humanity to Dreyman. Wiesler’s sacrifice, his loss of his job and status in order to protect ‘the other’ for no apparent reason make Dreyman re-think his own
Image & Narrative, Vol 12, No2 (2011) 91 values. Through this Dreyman is able to move from being a clever and technically brilliant writer to one who begins to examine the human condition in all its complexity.
Ostalgie
Not all the memories of the GDR that circulate are negative. ‘Ostalgie’ - nostalgia for the East - as previously argued is theorised as offering a sense of often ironic affection for the everyday life and consumer goods of the GDR. This nostalgia is explained by Blum (2004: 230) as a response to the ‘sense of loss and dislocation’ experienced when ‘an entire state, together with its institutions, cultural values, and individual hierarchies, has been swept a way...’ and which results in the majority of individuals seeming to ‘miss a sense of legitimacy of their individual past, together with its own symbols and rituals’. This individual sense of personal loss is bound up with the recognition that the loss is shared and is part of a collective experience and response to the re-unification of Germany.
Good Bye Lenin! provides a fictional enactment of this scenario. Alex and his family and friends are convinced that his mother will die from shock if she finds out that the GDR has been overthrown. They believe that her sense of herself, of her ‘legitimacy’ was entirely bound up in ‘symbols and rituals’ of the communist state. In order to protect her from harm they re-create a ‘little GDR’ in their apartment. According to Heidenreich (nd: 2, online) ‘The common view is that cultural and collective memory is produced through and reflected in objects, images and representations’. Alex and his co-conspirators re-enact the GDR. Alex attempts to preserve his mother’s memory through the detailed re-construction of their previous life to the extent that he and a friend create daily news videos where they reiterate the state TV channels propaganda. Through their investment in the fantasy continuation of the GDR Alex and his co-conspirators recreate a sense of community and shared values that they did not realise they had lost.
In Good Bye Lenin! East German achievements are celebrated through two recurring narrative motifs. These are evident in Alex’s fascination with space travel (in the homage to Sigmund Jähn and in the form of Space Rockets) and the Sandmännchen. The history of space exploration records the achievements of the Eastern Block in the 1970s. Sigmund Jähn as the first German in space is doubly important for East Germans. He rose through the ranks of the GDR air force and went on to work for the European Space Agency after reunification.
Image & Narrative, Vol 12, No2 (2011) 92 Versions of the Sandman were made either side of the wall. The Sandmännchen produced in East Germany proved to be the more successful programme and replaced its Western rival. Sandmännchen toys have now become a significant product. During a recent visit to the KaDeWe (Kaufhaus des Westens, historically the showcase of Western consumer culture in Berlin) the toy department was dominated by a Sandmännchen display. At certain points these motifs are combined when Alex launches his first rocket Sandmännchen is sitting in the cockpit. On the 7th of October 1989, the 40th anniversary of the GDR, Pittiplatsch, a character in the programme, is sitting on the windowsill with a poster of Jähn is on his bedroom wall, as the military parade of armoured cars shakes the apartment. Furthermore, Alex’s half brother and sister watch ‘Sandmännchen’ when he meets his father in the west for the first time in 11 years. Alex believes it is Sigmund Jähn who is the taxi driver who drives him to his father’s house. He asks the taxi driver, who he assumes is Jähn, to play the role of Honecker’s replacement in the dissolution of the GDR video he and Dennis create for his mother. At the end, Alex uses a rocket to scatter his mother’s ashes over Berlin. This is followed by the Soyuz images of Jähn, Sandmännchen and Mascha from orbit, as Alex wonders if his mother is now looking down on Berlin just as the cosmonaut once did.
‘Ostalgie’ is more typically identified with the narrow range of consumer goods available in the GDR which were often scarce and of dubious design and quality. This is directly referred to in Good Bye Lenin! through Christiane’s (Alex’s mother) role as a peoples’ champion. In several scenes she can be see dictating witty letters to the Central Committee about their failure to address the material needs of the community. The background mise en scène of both Good Bye Lenin! and Mrs Ratcliffe’s Revolution in the GDR scenes features Trabants and Wartburgs, now discontinued East German cars, despised and rejected once the Wall fell, yet which now have achieved cult status and figure as icons of the mythical past. The Ratcliffe family stand out both in Bingley and Asche because FR drives a Moskvich. As the family approaches the GDR border the guards ask FR why he drives a Soviet car. When he responds that it is a gesture of solidarity with his communist comrades the guards double over with laughter: A joke all Ossies would get, (the irony that anyone who had the choice of a western car would drive a Moskvich.) The apartments that Alex’s family and Wiesler occupy feature the distinctive furniture, fabrics and wallpaper recognised by all who lived in the GDR.
The changing value of these East German consumer goods is made evident in Good Bye Lenin! when Alex decides to create the fiction that the GDR is still in existence for his
Image & Narrative, Vol 12, No2 (2011) 93 mother. The household goods which had been carefully acquired and nurtured in the GDR have been thrown out onto the pavement. Clothes and hairstyles have been changed for Western fashions. Alex has to search bins and flea markets to re-equip the apartment and clothe his family and friends to create a convincing semblance of the GDR. Tellingly, the one thing his mother desires is the local Spreewälder Gurken, gherkins from the East German Spreewald region, which in the post unification globalised market were no longer available and were replaced by Dutch products. Such goods have now made a remarkable comeback, their qualities being symbolic of both individual acts of remembering and of group identity. East German supermarkets are full of products proudly labelled ‘made in the East’.
Less material aspects of Ostalgie are evident in the symbols of GDR community activities. Both Good Bye Lenin! and Mrs Ratcliffe’s Revolution feature scenes of Young Pioneers in uniform singing the same song ‘Unsere Heimat’ (Our Homeland) a GDR patriotic song extolling the beauties of nature and the worthiness of its protection. Initially, in both films the Young Pioneers represent investment in community. When the Ratcliffes arrive in Asche they are given a welcome party at the school where the Young Pioneers sing for them. When her husband leaves for the West, Alex’s mother (Good Bye Lenin!), throws herself into her role as a GDR citizen through her job as a teacher and working with the Young Pioneer choir. We see posed images of smiling young people singing on daytrips. In both films the Young Pioneers take on more sinister connotations. In Good Bye Lenin! when Alex stages a birthday party for his mother in the post-GDR era he has to pay the children to wear the uniform and sing. In East Berlin, his mother believes that they have come to her bedside to express gratitude and affection; whereas in Mrs Ratcliffe’s Revolution, Mary spies on her family wearing her Young Pioneer uniform. These seemingly contradictory representations of the Young Pioneers, the sweet harmonies of the songs and the white uniforms and blue scarves which imply a common purpose, are contrasted with the devious motivations of the children. They invoke some of the cynicism and anxiety already apparent in the GDR about official displays of communal virtue and support of the state.
Conclusion
Finally, the analysis of these three very different films reveals a number of ways in which memories of the GDR are evoked and used to structure popular narratives. This provides a sense of authenticity for audiences who directly experienced the GDR and verisimilitude for those who did not. These films portray the ‘otherness’ of the GDR for entertainment and
Image & Narrative, Vol 12, No2 (2011) 94 profit. However, these representations are not purely exploitative of a subordinate and socially and economically marginal identity. Through their narrative structures and mise en scène they allow for the renegotiation of understandings of what it was like to live in the GDR and what it was/ is to be an ‘Ossie’.
References:
Blum, M. (2004) ‘Remaking the East German Past: Ostalgie, Identity, and Material Culture.’ In: The Journal of Popular Culture, Vol.XXXIV (3), pp.229-253.
Boym, S. (2001) The Future of Nostalgia. New York: Basic Books.
Graham Westphal, W. (2005) ‘Dis-remembering and Re-remembering the GDR. Material Culture and East Germany’s Self-Reflexive Memory in Good Bye Lenin!.’ In: Roberts, L. M. (Ed) Germany and the Imagined Past. Cambridge: Scholars Press.
Halbwachs, M. (1992) On Collective Memory. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press.
Heidenreich,L. (nd) ’Collective Memory, Identity and Place Making in Reunified Berlin’,
online, available at:
http://www.irmgard-coninx-stiftung.de/fileadmin/user_upload/pdf/urbanplanet/identities/ws2/082%20Heidenreich.pdf ,
[accessed: 6/01/11].
Huyssen, A. (1995) Twilight Memories. Marking Time in a Culture of Amnesia. London: Routledge.
Naficy, H. and T. H. Gabriel (1993) Otherness and the Media. Langhorne, Penn.: Harwood Academic Publishers.
Sayre, N. (1982) Running Time: The Films of the Cold War. New York: Dial Press. Warnock, M. (1987) Memory. London: Faber and Faber.
Image & Narrative, Vol 12, No2 (2011) 95 Notes on Contributors
Margaret Montgomerie is a Principal Senior Lecturer at De Montfort University, Leicester. Her main teaching is in the area of Media, Gender and Identity. Her research is mainly concerned with shifts in the representation of marginalised identities in popular screen fictions. Her most recent work investigates representations of the disabled and impaired. MMontgomerie@dmu.ac.uk
Anne- Kathrin Reck is a real ‘Ossi’ who grew up behind the Iron Curtain and experienced life there up to the age of 25. She was educated in East Germany and moved to the UK in the early 1990’s. She has worked in UK Higher Education teaching German and Sociolinguistics and more recently Academic Skills to international students and students with learning differences. Anne-Kathrin is currently a Senior Dyslexia Tutor for the HE sector.
