Everything Remains Different
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| free admission |
| 12 years and older |
| German |
| Mechanical Arena in the Foyer |
| Part of: Talking About Ruptures |
| Belongs to: Transform! |
The Peaceful Revolution changed everything for many people in the GDR: familiar things vanished into thin air, what they had learned became unimportant and suddenly the focus was on the “I” instead of the long-focused “we”. During this time, people in the East either achieved remarkable feats of adaptation, ventured into self-employment and learned new professions – or they were unable to keep pace with the changes and became the losers of history. That’s how it was – or was it? What does the West say about the East and vice versa? What are “West” and “East” actually supposed to be? How do we remember 1989? Who are “we”, 35 years later?
Moderation
Markus Dichmann
Participants in the discussion
Dirk Oschmann, Frank Trentmann, Katharina Warda
Participants
Dirk Oschmann
Dirk Oschmann was born in Gotha in 1967. From 1986 to 1993, he studied German, English and American Studies at the Universities of Jena and Buffalo/USA. He has been Professor of Modern German Literature at the University of Leipzig since 2011. His publications include books on 18th century poetics, Schiller and Kafka. His book Der Osten: eine westdeutsche Erfindung, published in 2023, is now in its 16th edition and has been translated into several languages.
Katharina Warda
Katharina Warda is an author and sociologist. She was a fellow of the Friedrich Schlegel Graduate School for Literary Studies and is doing her doctorate in Berlin and Princeton on the resistance of biographical narratives in diary blogs. Warda also works as a freelance writer with a focus on East Germany, marginalized identities, racism, classism and punk. In 2021, she was a member of the advisory board of Kein Schlussstrich!, a nationwide theater project on the NSU complex. In her project Dark Germany, she explores the post-reunification period from the social margins and illuminates blind spots in German historiography, based on her own experiences as a Black East German woman in the GDR and after 1989/90.
Frank Trentmann
Frank Trentmann, born in 1965, is Professor of History at Birkbeck College, University of London, and at the University of Helsinki. He was previously Assistant Professor at Princeton University. He studied at the University of Hamburg, the London School of Economics and Harvard University. Frank Trentmann lives in London.
He has received several awards for his publications, including the Humboldt Award for Research from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. His book Herrschaft der Dinge. Die Geschichte des Konsums vom 15. Jahrhundert bis heute was named Science Book of the Year in Austria in 2018. In 2023, he received the prestigious Bochum Historians’ Prize.
His great moral history of the Germans, Aufbruch des Gewissens: Eine Geschichte der Deutschen von 1942 bis heute, was also published in 2023 and ranked number 1 Political Book of the Year 2023, SZ, number 1 on the non-fiction best book list in December 2023 and January 2024. Also one of the best non-fiction books of 2023 by The Telegraph and Der Spiegel and “Best Books of the Year,” The New Yorker.
Markus Dichmann
Markus Dichmann, born in 1987, is a freelance author, reporter and presenter on Deutschlandradio programs. He presents the weekly magazine show Eine Stunde History for Deutschlandfunk Nova, which won the German Podcast Award in 2019 and was nominated for the German Radio Award in 2017. For his work as an author and reporter, often on historical topics, he won the German-French Journalism Prize and was nominated for the German-Polish Tadeusz Mazowiecki Prize. As a Johannes Rau scholarship holder, he worked as a freelance correspondent in Istanbul. He completed a traineeship at Deutschlandradio, studied communication science, politics and law at the Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität Münster, and has previously worked in print, radio and television (WAZ, ZDF, Deutschlandfunk).