Since the attempt to unite two parts of a country divided for four decades yielded contradictory results, this volume provides a balance sheet of the successes and failures of German unification during the first quarter century after the fall of the Wall. Five themes, ranging from the transfer of political institutions to the economic crisis, from the social upheaval for women’s movements to the cultural efforts at interpretation and the changes in foreign policy have been chosen to illustrate the complexity of the process. The contributors represent a broad interdisciplinary mix of political scientists, historians, and literary scholars. Because personal experiences tend to color scholarly judgments, they are drawn from West Germany, East Germany, and the United States. This collection is the most up-to-date and comprehensive assessment of the political, social, and intellectual consequences of the efforts to regain German unity.
Table des matières
Preface
Introduction: Growing Together? A Tentative Balance Sheet of German Unification
Konrad H. Jarausch
PART I: POLITICAL PROCESSES
Chapter 1.Two Decades of Unity: Continuity and Change in Political Institutions
Gero Neugebauer
Chapter 2. United, Yet Separate: A View from the East
Heinrich Bortfeld
Chapter 3.Debates and Perceptions about Unification: The Centrality of Discourse
Helga Welsh
PART II: ECONOMIC PROBLEMS
Chapter 4. Institutional Coping: The Collapse of the East German Economy and the Role of the Treuhandanstalt 1989-1990
Wolfgang Seibel
Chapter 5. East Germany 1989 to 2010: A Fragmented Development
Rainer Land
Chapter 6. Getting Even: East German Economic Underperformance after Unification
Jonathan Zatlin
PART III: SOCIAL UPHEAVAL
Chapter 7. 1989 and the Crisis of Feminist Politics
Ute Gerhard
Chapter 8. Womens’ Movements in East Germany: Are We in Europe Yet?
Ingrid Miethe
Chapter 9. Feminist Encounters: Germany, the EU and Beyond
Myra Marx Ferree
PART IV: CULTURAL CONFLICT
Chapter 10.After the GDR? Restoring Literature’s Standing
Klaus Scherpe
Chapter 11. Unity and Difference: Some Reflections on a Disparate Field
Frank Hörnigk
Chapter 12. The Painful Exit from the Cold War: East German Writers and the Demise of the Reading Culture
Frank Trommler
PART V: INTERNATIONAL NORMALIZATION
Chapter 13. The ‘Normalization’ of Humanitarian and Military Missions Abroad
Beate Neuss
Chapter 14. German Foreign Policy after 1990: Some Critical Remarks
Erhard Crome
Chapter 15. ‘To Deploy or not to Deploy:’ The Erratic Evolution of German Foreign Policy since Unification
Andrew Port
Notes on Contributors
Bibliography
Index
A propos de l’auteur
Konrad H. Jarausch is the Lurcy Professor of European Civilization at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Senior Fellow of the Zentrum für Zeithistorische Forschung in Potsdam. He has written or edited about forty books, spanning topics such as the First and Second World War, German students and professionals, the development of the GDR, post-war German history, and debates about historical methods and historiography. Some of the recent titles include After Hitler (2005), Reluctant Accomplice (2011), volume 3 of the Geschichte der Humboldt Universität 1945-2000 (2012) and Out of Ashes: A New History of Europe in the 20th Century (2015).