This Chapter Explores The Memory of the Nationale Volksarmee (NVA) of the German Democratic Republic in contemporary films and texts. It examines the origins of contemporary representations of the NVA in pre-unification works and offers readings of the following: the novel NVA, by Leander Haußmann (2005), and the film version of NVA, directed by Haußmann and co-authored with Thomas Brussig (also 2005), Jörg Waehner’s memoir Einstrich-Keinstrich: NVA-Tagebuch (2006), and Uwe Tellkamp’s novel Der Turm (2008). The NVA did not feature prominently in cultural production in the decade that followed unification, which focused rather on the Ministerium für Staatssicherheit (MfS, Stasi) in cinematic and literary engagements with the legacy of the GDR. However, alongside works such as Christoph D. Brumme’s novel Tausend Tage (2000), Jens Bisky’s memoir Geboren am 13. August: Der Sozialismus und ich (2004), and Ingo Schulze’s novel Neue Leben (2005), the texts and the film considered here have since 2000 brought the NVA into the mainstream of cultural representation. The chapter suggests in the light of current debates about social experience in the GDR that in the works by Haußmann (and Brussig), Waehner, and Tellkamp the representation of military service in the NVA reflects a wider concern with the remembered “normality” of life in East Germany; and it shows how these works in the process engage with and adapt a wider cultural tradition of the representation of the military. Finally, the question arises whether renewed interest in the NVA today is linked also to changing perceptions of the Bundeswehr, the army of the Federal Republic established in 1955, following its post-Cold War transformation into a global intervention force.

The discussion here omits the apologetics of senior officers that comprise a significant but declining part of the memoir literature about the NVA. Texts by former generals and officials in the Defense Ministry such as Heinz Keßler’s Zur Sache und zur Person (1997) or Hans-Georg Löffler’s Soldat der NVA von Anfang bis Ende (2006) offer staunch and predictable justifications of the antifascist commitment of the NVA “from the top.” What characterizes the works considered here is rather the fact that they construct the memory of military service “from below,” from the rank-and-file perspective. In the novel NVA by Haußmann and the film version co-written with Brussig, as in Waehner’s Einstrich-Keinstrich, the point of view is that of the conscript undertaking the basic eighteen months of service.