THE PAST, WRITES MAURICE HALBWACHS, is created through talking about it. Only through communicating with others, through narrating lived events and experiences, can memories begin to be formed, let alone fix themselves in individual or shared memory. The social act of repeating these stories influences what is remembered by successive generations and orders their understanding of the past. How memories endure beyond the lifetime of the individuals and groups that recall them relies on their transmission through cultural forums, such as photographs, survivor testimonials, novels, or films. Even then, only with the tacit agreement, as Susan Sontag writes, “that this is important, and this is the story about how it happened” can the “pictures … lock the story in our minds.” By establishing a social framework through which nationally conscious individuals organize their history, memory — or more specifically, what a nation remembers — figures crucially in constituting national identity. The selective exclusion of the memory of personally lived events from the conscious remembering of history, particularly when its position conflicts with the agreed-upon memory of the past, has been witnessed throughout the ages by persons and groups marginalized by gender, ethnicity, or political repression, among other things. It is, therefore, not surprising that individuals and groups whose experiences are excluded from or diminished in public memory struggle ultimately to validate their identity.

A Spiegel summary of the 2009 Leipzig Book Fair suggests that the twentieth anniversary of the fall of the Wall, an event appropriated to German memory on both sides of the former divide, opens the potential to reflect on GDR history, a history that by and large belongs only to the East Germans. The article notes the unusual number of books in this anniversary year that thematize life in the former East and wonders whether the twenty-year anniversary might propitiously allow the book market to counter a “West German ignorance” on all things East. Perhaps, suggests its author, the book market might be able to forge an interest in “brothers and sisters” in the East that leads to a social, not just political, unification. Recent publications, the article remarks, celebrate a subjective and fragmented rather than historiographical perspective on the GDR past, for, in the words of Jutta Voigt, “Es sind immer die Details, die das Pflaster von der Wunde reißen.”