| Since the Fall of the Berlin Wall, Germany has been a very complex society trying to develop a common identity after forty years of division. In this process the perception of the past plays a crucial role. East and West Germans each have a different collective recollection of the GDR, yet both are involved in the process of shaping a common self-understanding. Their different representations of the past are possibly expressed in public debates but also in cultural artefacts such as film and literature. This project focuses on the one hand on the construction of the communist past and the revolution of 1989 in German movies and novels and, on the other hand, on public debates about selected buildings and monuments in the German capital city. The aim is to analyse the role these literary and non-literary texts play in the construction of cultural identity in united Germany. |
