Remembering and Rethinking the GDR
Remembering and Rethinking the GDR
复制标题
记住并重新思考东德
DOI:
10.1057/9781137292094_8
复制
发表时间:
2013
期刊:
影响因子:
--
通讯作者:
Kelly E
中科院分区:
文献类型:
--
作者:
Kelly E
The redrawing of borders in post-communist Europe led to a significant transformation of the continent’s diasporic landscape. The migration that followed the collapse of the Iron Curtain resulted in the reintegration of certain long-established diasporas into their ethnocultural homelands. 25 per cent of Bulgarian Turks, for example, were repatriated to Turkey in 1989 (Stewart, 2003: 30), while the following decade saw an influx of 1,630,000 Russian Germans to Germany (Pohl, 2009: 280). At the same time, entirely new diasporas were created, not by the movement of people across borders, as has traditionally been the case, but by the movement of borders across people. With the fragmentation of Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union into smaller nationalising states, various ethnic communities were separated from their national homelands and subjected to processes of othering. Rogers Brubaker (2000: 2) describes this type of diasporic formation as ‘accidental’.‘Accidental diasporas’, he observes,‘crystallize suddenly following a dramatic–and often traumatic–reconfiguration of political space’.The fate of East Germans following the fall of the Berlin Wall was initially cast as one of reintegration. German unification was framed as the bringing together of a single ethnocultural community, and the reclassification of East Germans as citizens of the Federal Republic as the closing of a historic rift. Characteristic was the significance placed on Willy Brandt’s alleged declaration on 10 November 1989 to a demonstration in West Berlin:‘Now that which belongs together can grow together.’1 As the sociocultural differences between eastern and western