Out of the Ashes: Refashioning Socialist Selves in the GDR, 1989-90

One of the most common clichés about the collapse of the East German state is that no one saw it coming. Organized opposition, as such, did not exist, and the upheavals of 1989 proceeded so rapidly that few contemporary observers believed the Berlin Wall was vulnerable until the day after it fell. In the early years of the post-Cold War era this was attributed to the effectiveness of the GDR's "totalitarian" control over its citizens. More recently, however, a more nuanced picture has emerged. Historians now emphasize the possibility that many of the GDR’s citizens were committed participants in – rather than victims of – the socialist project.

This means that in 1989, millions of people were faced with difficult questions about their beliefs, loyalties, and ideological commitments. In this paper, I focus on a unique group of actors whose experiences and reactions to the events of 1989 yield important insights into the individual-level dynamics of major sociopolitical transformations: journalists and other members of the news media. Under socialism, East German journalists were considered (and often considered themselves to be) vital components of the state apparatus. But as the ruling Socialist Unity Party's power began to falter, many journalists began to embrace liberal notions of an independent press as the keystone of their identity as political actors and virtuous citizens. Using newspapers, oral histories, and internal Party documents, I explore these apparent “conversion moments” as windows into the relationship between East German state ideology and (post)socialist selfhood.