End of Story

Nachträglichkeit and the German Past

East Germans protested against their state in late 1989; East and West Germany became one again in 1990. No longer Ost und Westdeutschland, but Deutschland. And, for roughly twenty-five years since, we have had this single entity. What could be simpler than this? There seems to be little in dispute and few footholds for re-exploring the history of Germany after 1989. Common sense dictates that this is how things stand today; yet, if we move in reverse from 2014 to 1989, we can notice the belated hardening into 'fate' of what was earlier an open moment — a moment at which contingency was visible. As we move backwards (2014, 2013, 2012 ... 1991, 1990, 1989), the range of possible futures increases at each point. The present ending has circumscribed what the past offers through a narrative that excludes what 'failed' in history. This is common enough: 'Every past event, along with its belated understanding, comprises a site of multiple possible readings, each one capable of transforming our horizon of understanding and eliciting in its turn another potential shock of understanding'. Given this multiplicity of readings and our anxiety in the face of the unknown, we seek out certainty — namely, the fiction that what we have is necessary, given our past. Hence, the everyday experience of history as linear narrative is an illusion — a necessary illusion — that 'masks the fact that it is the ending that retroactively confers the consistency of an organic whole on the preceding events'. A history always emerges, but it can be — will be — contested.

WIR WAREN DAS VOLK

The 'backwards' approach yields, in this German case, an idea of the revolution's narrowing meaning; the way East German voices grow harder to hear as revolution becomes re-unification becomes Germany today; the way an East-West openness forecloses on a mutual suspicion and an ongoing distinction in East-West identity. East Germans disappear as political subjects in re-unified Germany through a process of forgetting and reinterpretation of the past. I contend that four terms arrange the historical account of the GDR and its end, moving to close off the varieties of historical experience and operating as a 'frame' for historical narration: (i) Mauerfall and (ii) Wende as symbolizations of the revolutionary sequence (often compressed into a singular '1989'), which later became (iii) 're-unification' (a different stage and quite distinct), and also the colloquial (and derogatory but increasingly 'reclaimed') terminology of the (iv) Ossi as a distinctive figure of East Germanness, which emerges after 1989 alongside its West counterpart (Wessi). These signifiers arrange historical experience. They exhibit what we might call the power of naming — what Freud recognized as the power of narration and naming to dissipate the traumatic potential of events (or objects) — or 'the word kills the thing'. But this death is only superficial; the thing, the event, the moment lives on in another scene. If we scan the chain of signifiers, we find breaks, or aporiai, where another history can be seen — where that history breaks through the self-satisfied babble of the present. That will be this book's task, but, for now, let's look at these terms.

Mauerfall

The revolutionary events of 1