6: “Normalizing” the Past: East German Culture and Ostalgie

Chapters in this book

1. Frontmatter i
2. Contents v
3. Acknowledgments vii
4. Introduction 1
5. 1: “Normalization”: Has Helmut Kohl’s Vision Been Realized? 17
6. 2: Coping with Disparity: Continuity and Discontinuity in Economic Policy since Unification 31
7. 3: Understanding Germany: The Limits of “Normalization” and the Prevalence of Strategic Culture 49
8. 4: “Normalization” through Europeanization: The Role of the Holocaust 61
9. 5: “Representing Normality”: Architecture in Berlin 75
10. 6: “Normalizing” the Past: East German Culture and Ostalgie 89
11. 7: National Memory’s Schlüsselkinder: Migration, Pedagogy, and German Remembrance Culture 105
12. 8: The Return of “Undead” History: The West German Terrorist as Vampire and the Problem of “Normalizing” the Past in Margarethe von Trotta’s Die bleierne Zeit (1981) and Christian Petzold’s Die innere Sicherheit (2001) 121
13. 9: “Normalizing” the “Old” Federal Republic? The FRG between 1949 and 1989 in Recent German Fiction 137
14. 10: Reconciliation between the Generations: The Image of the Ordinary German Soldier in Dieter Wellershoff’s Der Ernstfall and Ulla Hahn’s Unscharfe Bilder 151
15. 11: “(un)sägliche Vergleiche”: What Germans Remembered (and Forgot) in Former Yugoslavia in the 1990s 167
16. 12: “Normal” as “Apolitical”: Uwe Timm’s Rot and Thomas Brussig’s Leben bis Männer 181
17. 13: “Narrative Normalization” and Günter Grass’s Im Krebsgang 195
18. 14: From “Normalization” to Globalization. German Fiction into the New Millennium: Christian Kracht, Ingo Schulze, and Feridun Zaimog˘lu 209
19. 15: Abnormal Consensus? The New Internationalism of German Cinema 223
20. Notes on the Contributors 237
21. Index 241