Freedom, Self-determination, and Community in East Germany after 1989

Thirty years after the Peaceful Revolution in East Germany, there are still significant differences between East and West in Germany. In addition to the overall income and wealth gap, right-wing populist parties and movements enjoy significantly more support among citizens living in the former East, as became clear during the federal elections in 2017. The trend is expected to continue in the state parliamentary elections in Saxony, Brandenburg, and Thuringia in fall 2019. Numerous attempts have been made in various academic disciplines to understand East Germany and the East Germans since German unification, from the contact hypothesis meant to explain the prevalence of racism, to analyses of authoritarianism that focus on the East German state as a dictatorship and claims that the system has produced anti-democratic attitudes and a lack of political competence. And yet the majority of such analyses – particularly in the German-language literature – not only fail to consider their East German subjects in the context of their lifeworlds, but also largely neglect the transformational period and the structural changes in the economic, social, and cultural spheres that have taken place. This anthropological research project attempts to remedy this incomplete picture by focusing on subjects and their lifeworlds.

Based on one year of field research in Gera, including participant observations and narrative-biographical interviews, this study will examine the transformation process through the lens of Axel Honneth’s theory of recognition as a period of social, economic, political, and cultural change in which old structures were discarded and new dominances emerged. For innumerable adaptations were necessary in order to integrate the East German subjects, socialized under state socialism, into the democratic and capitalist-oriented West German system. Using the everyday experiences and biographical narratives of the fieldwork subjects, this study will empirically examine theoretical concepts such as freedom, self-determination, and solidarity and relate them to the structural changes after East Germany became part of the Federal Republic of Germany. Two aspects are of particular interest here: first, telling the story of the transformation process after 1989/1990 from the perspective of the East German subject, which can be understood as a subaltern perspective. Second, it attempts to trace the ways that racist, right-wing populist and exclusionary attitudes encountered in the field may be expressions of social alienation resulting from local, cultural, and historical circumstances.