Dazwischen: between the GDR and a united Germany

My dissertation, Dazwischen: Between the GDR and a United Germany investigates how Germans, especially the citizens of the former East Germany, come to terms with the history and culture of the GDR in a post-unification context. I examine how the concepts of Vergangenheitsaufarbeitung and Vergangenheitsbewältigung developed in the wake of World War II to describe the struggles involved in coming to terms with the Nazi past were taken over in the immediate aftermath of German unification in 1989. While suggesting certain continuities and similarities between the two periods, the use of these concepts in the post-1989 context tends, in general, to conceal more than it reveals. As a way of addressing this problem and of offering an alternative to prevailing frameworks, I use the term Dazwischen, drawn from a number of works discussed in my dissertation. The novels Das Provisorium by Wolfgang Hilbig, Schlehweins Giraffe by Bernd Schirmer, and Der Zimmerspringbrunnen by Jens Sparschuh, and the film Good Bye, Lenin! by Wolfgang Becker describe how the protagonists, authors and readers from ii the former GDR negotiate their new identities in a unified Germany, how they often feel suspended and trapped in this transitional experience, and how they nevertheless use the feeling of being neither here nor there as a "place" from which to reevaluate and critically analyze their GDR past and unified German present.Ph.D.Includes bibliographical referencesby Mareen Fuch