Forms of Resistance and the Afterlives of the GDR

Abstract: This article takes its cue from the way East Germany was remembered during and after the Wende of 1989–90. In particular, it analyses the way the Berlin Republic is haunted by the unacknowledged legacies of the Communist state: its unrealized ambitions as well as its catastrophic failures. The focus is on the possibilities for resistance offered by poetry, using a case study of the work of Volker Braun, a writer who published critical work in the socialist state and continues to do so in the Berlin Republic. It shifts attention from sites or agents of resistance, however, to forms of resistance. It asks how Braun's aesthetic strategies enact resistance: offering a criticism of contemporary reality, keeping multiple possibilities in play and resisting the status quo. And, in particular, it focuses on the forms which allow this to happen. This is explored under the sign of what could be called a 'spectral aesthetic' that resists reality but also allows the energies of the past to be mobilized in the service of alternative futures. This has a special significance in the current political climate in the Eastern Länder of the former GDR. The success of the far right is caused in part by the suppression of the East German past. It also ties in with the fierce debates about the legacy of the GDR past being waged by historians.