Transformations of German Cultural Identity, 1989–2009

This special issue of New German Critique focused on transformations in German cultural identity in the two decades following the fall of the Berlin Wall explores the variety of ways in which former East and West Germans, including migrants from Turkey, have addressed the implications of unification.  While the soothing rhetoric of politicians has focused on the largely successful integration of the Berlin Republic into the international community, these articles give voice to expressions of self-doubt, not least by exposing the splintered and polyphonous way in which contemporary Germans regard their complex individual and collective pasts.  The authors, a distinguished array of scholars of modern Germany based in Ireland and the United Kingdom, pay particular attention to the role that memories of Wilhelmine imperialism, the Weimar Republic, the Third Reich, and the German Democratic Republic in particular have played in the cultural expression since the founding of the Berlin Republic.  Their subjects -- Bauhaus exhibitions held in Weimar, Berlin and New York and photographs of Berlin by Florian Profitlich as well as poems by Wolfgang Braun and the novels of Emine Sevgi Özdamar, Zafer Senocak, Jenny Erpenbeck, Julia Schoch, Wolfgang Hilbig, and Uwe Tellkamp – are diverse enough to illuminate the varied ways in which several generations of German intellectuals have addressed the complex legacies of German history.