Coming to Terms with the Past and Present: Memory, Gender and German Studies

Abstract

Clearly a ‘founding member’ among German Studies scholars, Eva Kolinsky pursued an extraordinary array of topics, most of which drew on interdisciplinary research methods. This essay attempts to situate a limited number of her contributions in this ever evolving scholarly domain, emphasising the ‘past’, ‘present’ and ‘future’ dimensions of that work. It offers a brief introduction to subsequent essays comprising this commemorative volume, indicating the ways in which Kolinsky influenced and affirmed not only the writings of her contemporaries but also the work of ‘successor’ generations on both sides of the Atlantic

Notes

1. Uttered by Gavin Stephens in William Faulkner's Requiem for a Nun (New York: Random House, 1951); see also the first sentence in Christa Wolf's book, Kindheitsmuster (Berlin: Aufbau Verlag, 1976).

2. Theodor W. Adorno, ‘What Does Coming to Terms with the Past Mean?’, in Geoffrey H. Hartman (ed.), Bitburg in Moral and Political Perspective (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), pp.114–29.

3. Joyce Marie Mushaben, From Post-War to Post-Wall Generations: Changing Attitudes towards the National Question and NATO in the Federal Republic of Germany (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1998).

4. Christa Wolf, Was bleibt. Erzählung (Hamburg: Luchterhand, 1990).

5. Martin Greiffenhagen and Sylvia Greiffenhagen, Ein schwieriges Vaterland. Zur politischen Kultur im vereinigten Deutschland (München: Piper, 1990).

6. Konrad Jarausch, ‘Survival in Catastrophe: Mending Broken Memories’, presented at the University of Missouri-St. Louis, 2 Nov. 1999, reprinted in Politik, Newsletter of the Conference Group on German Politics (Spring 2000).

7. Peter Reichel, Vergangenheitsbewältigung in Deutschland. Die Auseinandersetzung mit der NS-Diktatur von 1945 bis heute (München: C.H. Beck Verlag, 2001), p.199.

8. Eva Kolinsky, described on Day 1, 17 Oct., in ‘My Holocaust Journey, 17–21 October, 1999’, available on a memorial website maintained by her spouse of many years, Martin Kolinsky.

9. Noteworthy exceptions include: Renate Bridenthal, Atina Grossmann and Marion Kaplan (eds.), When Biology Became Destiny: Women in Weimar and Nazi Germany (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1984); Claudia Koonz, Mothers in the Fatherland: Women, the Family and Nazi Politics (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1988); and Joyce Marie Mushaben, ‘Collective Memory Divided and Reunited: Mothers, Daughters and the Fascist Experience in Germany’, History and Memory 11/1 (Spring/Summer 1999), pp.7–40.

10. Gerda Lerner, The Majority Finds Its Past: Placing Women in History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981); also, Renate Bridenthal, Susan M. Stuard and Merry E. Wiesner (eds.), Becoming Visible: Women in European History, 3rd edn. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1998).

11. Citation stems from her personal journal, noted as Day 3, 19 Oct. 1999.

12. Eva Kolinsky, ‘Everyday Life Transformed: A Case Study of Leipzig since German Unification’, German Politics and Society 16/4 (Summer 1998), pp.103–21; Eva Kolinsky (ed.), Between Hope and Fear. Everyday Life in Post-Unification East Germany: A Case Study of Leipzig (Keele: Keele University Press, 1995).

13. Both parts of the paper are based on a project initiated by Eva Kolinsky and Mike Dennis, drawing on numerous interviews conducted with former contract workers, as well as on governmental, Stasi and Deutsche Volkspolizei (DVP) materials collected in federal and regional archives in Germany.

14. Alice Schwarzer, Der ‘kleine Unterschied’ und seine großen Folgen. Frauen über sich – Beginn einer Befreiung (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Verlag, 1977).

15. Interparliamentary Union, http://www.ipu.org/wmn-e/world.htm.

16. Eva Kolinsky, ‘Political Participation and Parliamentary Careers: Women's Quotas in West Germany’, West European Politics 14/1 (Jan. 1991), pp.56–72.

17. One noteworthy experiment along these lines (in which the author participated) was more easily conceived than executed, an interdisciplinary study orchestrated by Konrad Jarausch (ed.), After Unity: Reconfiguring German Identity (Providence, RI/Oxford: Berghahn Books, 1997). Each chapter was composed by a ‘troika’ of scholars hailing from different disciplines, forced to ‘come to terms’ not only with different methodological approaches but also with divergent conceptual understandings and ‘primary source’ requirements.