A nation’s identity builds on a common past and traditions. After the Second World War, the newborn government of the GDR had to make a concerted effort to create such traditions, building on the...Show moreA nation’s identity builds on a common past and traditions. After the Second World War, the newborn government of the GDR had to make a concerted effort to create such traditions, building on the history of the German working class and their leading historical figures. Among them: Clara Zetkin. A dedicated and respected politician in her time, she was made an icon in the GDR, as she was portrayed as an ideal socialist role model and heroine throughout the public sphere, by means of the memory politics of the SED. The biographies, newspaper articles, films, and museums focused on Zetkin, as well as the street signs, statues, banknotes, and awards bearing her name in the GDR created a particular image of the historical figure: a model socialist heroine. This image differs from the historical figure of Zetkin, as some parts have been emphasized, others downplayed, or left out entirely.Show less
This thesis focuses on the question how literary writers intervened in the debates about the nature and history of the GDR in the period following unification by publishing their autobiographies ...Show moreThis thesis focuses on the question how literary writers intervened in the debates about the nature and history of the GDR in the period following unification by publishing their autobiographies (1990-1997). The examination of four writers’ autobiographies by separating their epistemic, moral and political relations to the past, while also considering the emotions expressed in them, reveals the underlying, leading arguments in these texts by shedding light on individual, implicit claims. The writers took varying but concrete stances in the debates. The perspective of the writers' relations to the past reveals their arguments and demonstrates that these were primarily based on epistemic and moral claims instead of on direct political suggestions. It shows the variety of the writers' 'political' arguments and explains in which ways the writers made political points or took a stance in these texts, namely by (epistemically) explaining or showing and by (morally) judging, ridiculing or lamenting certain aspects of their lives, thus differentiating the ‘political’ nature of the interventions and the strategies to convey these. Moreover, the thesis' approach reveals and explains the texts' contradictions. These inconsistencies reveal the issues in which the writers' present interpretations cannot be applied to the construction of their pasts, demonstrating where these ‘weak points’ lie and that autobiographies are not as free as fiction. The analysis furthermore reveals strong correlations between the autobiographies’ styles and conceptualisations. Overall, the thesis complements historiography in various ways. For one, it proves the value of studying the autobiographies of literary writers, of whom other scholars of autobiography assumed that they could easily frame their lives around their art and hold back on political questions. The historical approach furthermore contradicts and complements interpretations by literary scholars. It is original in its use of the perspective of relations to the past in combination with comparing expressed emotions in the texts. Ultimately, this analysis sheds light on the ways in which individuals can deal with historical changes impacting not only their present, but also their past lives.Show less
The images of photographic sequence, which show two or sometimes three Soviet soldiers raising the red Soviet banner on the burn-out Reichstag, Germany’s landmark building in Berlin, captured in...Show moreThe images of photographic sequence, which show two or sometimes three Soviet soldiers raising the red Soviet banner on the burn-out Reichstag, Germany’s landmark building in Berlin, captured in early May 1945 by the Red Army photographer Yevgeny Anan'evich Khaldei, have become one of the most emblematic pictures of the ending World War Two and the final defeat of the Third Reich. As Schlüsselbild (key picture), a photographic image with national, cultural and political symbolic characteristic, these photographs play as Bilderakte (image acts) play a crucial and active part in the designing and representing history for future interpretation, based remembering of the World War Two and the collapse of the Third Reich and the national reconstruction of post-1945 identity and narrative. This thesis analyzes the compositional appeal of this particular photographic sequence, consisting of several icon key pictures, which have been reproduced in schoolbooks, films, exhibitions and historiography, among other publication platforms. In an examination of documentation of this particular event and its rhetoric importance and the functioning of photography in visualizing and co-design/co-influence the discourse of future representation of the event, the national narrative and myth creation, this thesis addresses beside the compositional appeal and classification of the photographs as Schlüsselbild or Schlagbild (pictorial slogan) on the traditional function of such victory images, it explores the function of such photographs in context of war and to allocate ‘pre-images’ of visualizing epochal changeovers or beginning of new political time periods. The specificity and functionality of ‘documenting’ visually historical changeovers from the perspective of politics, shows secondly in a case study of two reproductions of the Reichstag icon in the context of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) the formative power of photography in the political argumentation process of the ‘liberation’ myth the function of image between the ‘documentary’ evidence and the ‘symbolic’ political message that is argued by the elites of the GDR. The analysis examines one of the possible interpretation of the photographs in the post-1945 political context and the construction of the mythological national narrative and collective memory. Taking the example of the official GDR’s official functionalization and interpretation of the iconic Reichstag sequence, this thesis is an attempt to demonstrate one example of the long pictorial tradition of visually capturing history in order to actively shape and co-determine the reception of the past event influence the future national identity construction and political argumentation communicated and generated by historical key images.Show less
