Cultural Memory East v. West: Is What Belongs Together Really Growing Together?

Abstract

In the more than forty years between 1945 and the fall of the Berlin Wall two quite different cultural traditions, or to borrow a much-discussed term of the time, different versions of 'cultural memory' developed in post-war Germany. It began with diametrically opposed foundation myths: in the East antifascism and socialism; in the West American 're-education', the German Mark and the economic miracle. By 1965 at the latest a situation of 'Diskulturalität' (Jürgen Link) existed, which took hold and became established until the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. The Federal Republic became an integral part of the western capitalist civilization; in the East an 'arbeiterliche Gesellschaft' (Wolfgang Engler) developed with, for the most part, quite different attitudes and values. The two bodies of German literature too are part and parcel of this distance — or perhaps they can be seen as reflecting it. Various questions present themselves: to what extent has there been a rapprochement between the two cultures and literatures in the twenty years since 1989/90? In what ways and why have they remained distinct? This paper attempts to answer these questions by focusing on the largely antagonistic and anyway distinct 'cultural memories' of East versus West. It comes to the conclusion that the cultural alienation between East and West is significant and will remain so for a long time: something that will be with us for at least three generations.