After the Berlin Wall: Memory and the Making of the New Germany, 1989 to the Present

The history and meaning of the Berlin Wall remain controversial, even three decades after its fall. Drawing on an extensive range of archival sources and interviews, this book profiles key memory activists who have fought to commemorate the history of the Berlin Wall and examines their role in the creation of a new German national narrative. With victims, perpetrators and heroes, the Berlin Wall has joined the Holocaust as an essential part of German collective memory. Key Wall anniversaries have become signposts marking German views of the past, its relevance to the present, and the complicated project of defining German national identity. Considering multiple German approaches to remembering the Wall via memorials, trials, public ceremonies, films, and music, this revelatory work also traces how global memory of the Wall has impacted German memory policy. It depicts the power and fragility of state-backed memory projects, and the potential of such projects to reconcile or divide.

Author: Hope M. Harrison
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 09/26/2019
Pages: 478
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 1.90lbs
Size: 9.38h x 6.49w x 1.04d
ISBN: 9781107049314

Review Citation(s):
Choice 07/01/2020

About the Author
Harrison, Hope M.: - Hope M. Harrison is Associate Professor of History and International Affairs at George Washington University, Washington DC. The recipient of fellowships from Fulbright, the Wilson Center, and the American Academy in Berlin, she is the author of Driving the Soviet up the Wall (2003), which was awarded the 2004 Marshall Shulman Book Prize by the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies, and was also published to wide acclaim in German translation. She has served on the National Security Council staff, currently serves on the board of three institutions in Berlin connected to the Cold War and the Berlin Wall, and has appeared on CNN, the History Channel, the BBC, and Deutschlandradio.