Spectres of the GDR: The Haunting of the Berlin Republic

尽管德国统一带来了新的开端，但自1990年以来，德国文化已经从向前看转向向后看。这部分是由于自1945年以来维持战后政治共识和人民日常生活的那些政党的崩溃。但它不仅仅是对东方的怀旧，或“Ostalgie”的产物，它给德语带来了一个新词。我们还目睹了对历史的更重大的重新谈判，包括重新评估在推动进步的过程中受到压制或沉默的东西。一个重要的例子是共产主义：一个是东德国赖以建立的“幽灵”;另一个是它所激发的社会主义国家：现在它本身也是一个幽灵，作为未实现的愿望、创伤或嘲弄而困扰着当代资本主义。这个项目探讨了如何在柏林共和国的东德及其遗产的记忆。它分析了如何，除了官方的公共文化的记忆，“未容纳”或禁忌的方面，过去已经表现出自己的形式，幽灵，鬼魂，亡灵，幽灵，吸血鬼，“二重身”和亡灵的文学，电影和文化的统一德国。传统上，亡灵的出现被解释为未竟事业的标志：象征、道德或认识论秩序的混乱，一旦鬼魂传递了信息，这种混乱就解决了。然而，在这种背景下，幽灵的广泛出现可以被解读为一场深刻危机的征兆。该项目以幽灵为具体焦点，讨论了过去二十年来主要和不太知名的艺术家的作品，其中各种各样的幽灵扮演了核心角色：分析后文德德国的“闹鬼主题”;统一后德国的光谱地形;传统的幻影;以及未被观察到但观察到的秘密警察的“幽灵”。三个案例研究，然后介绍了主要的作家，他们与幻影的持续接触提供了考虑传统，美学和写作本身的业务（克里斯塔沃尔夫，沃尔克布劳恩，海纳穆勒）的方式。但是，在第二个层面上，该项目借鉴了解构主义，精神分析和文化哲学，以挖掘更大的问题，如记忆，哀悼，记忆，代际转移和德国历史：也就是说，过去在隐喻层面上“困扰”现在的方式。它分析了一个特定的民主德国过去的幻影也动员其他尖锐的历史和互文（包括哈姆雷特的范式幽灵）的方式，以询问死者的回归对当代德国社会意味着什么。在整个过程中，鬼魂们被审问，因为他们告诉了我们（或隐藏了）关于过去的事情：通过怀旧、创伤、未实现的愿望或意识形态批评，但也因为他们表达了今天德国文化的状态。该项目还涉及三个相互关联的问题。它分析了与死者对话的“伦理学”;它考察了所谓的“光谱美学”的可能性和局限性;最后，它问这个特定的案例研究可以为文化批评家所称的“光谱转向”的研究做出什么贡献。通过这种方式，它表明，亡灵的形象对当下的文化健忘症提出了一个特殊的挑战，提醒人们，重要的历史可以在多大程度上被占主导地位的政治利益所掩盖。在这方面，它为文化哲学中的广泛辩论提供了素材，这些辩论涉及乌托邦的终结、马克思主义的未来或后世俗主义在当代思想中的意义。它还有助于讨论任何社会在任何时候都具有长期重要性的问题：损失、记忆和哀悼。最后，它的目的是表明，在文化方面，死者的回归，也许，提供了一个生命的重要标志。

Despite the pervasive rhetoric of new beginnings associated with the unification of Germany, German culture since 1990 has seen a paradigm shift from looking forwards to looking backwards. This is in part the result of the collapse of those certainties which had sustained the post-war political consensus as well as peoples' everyday lives since 1945. But it is not simply a product of the nostalgia for the East, or 'Ostalgie', which has brought a new word into the German language. We are also witnessing a much more significant renegotiation of history that involves re-evaluating what has been suppressed or silenced in the drive for progress. A key example is Communism: the 'spectre' upon which East Germany was founded; another is the socialist state it inspired: now itself a spectre that haunts contemporary capitalism as unrealised aspiration, trauma or travesty. This project examines how the GDR and its legacy are remembered in the Berlin Republic. It analyses how, alongside the official public culture of remembrance, 'un-accommodated' or taboo aspects of that past have manifested themselves in the form of spectres, ghosts, revenants, phantoms, vampires, 'doppelgänger' and the undead in the literature, film and culture of the united Germany. Traditionally, the appearance of a revenant has been interpreted as the sign of unfinished business: a disturbance in the symbolic, moral or epistemological order, which is resolved once the ghost has delivered its message. However, in this context the widespread appearance of spectres can be read as the symptom of a profound crisis.Using the spectre as a specific focus, the project addresses works of the last two decades by major and lesser-known artists in which revenants of various kinds play a central role: analysing the 'haunted subject' of post-Wende Germany; the spectral topographies of the united Germany; the phantoms of tradition; and the unobserved but observing the 'spooks' of the secret police. Three case studies then present major writers whose sustained engagement with phantoms offers ways into considering tradition, aesthetics and the business of writing itself (Christa Wolf, Volker Braun, Heiner Müller). But, at a second level, the project draws on deconstruction, psychoanalysis and cultural philosophy to tap into larger issues of melancholia, mourning, memory, generational transfer and German history: that is, the way the past 'haunts' the present at a metaphorical level. It analyses the way that phantoms of a specifically GDR past also mobilise other acute histories and intertexts (including the paradigmatic spectre of Hamlet), in order to ask what the return of the dead means for contemporary German society. Throughout the ghosts are interrogated for what they tell us (or conceal) about the past: through nostalgia, trauma, unfulfilled aspiration or ideological critique, but also for what they express about the state of German culture today. The project addresses three further linked questions. It analyses the 'ethics' of a dialogue with the dead; it examines the possibilities and limitations of what might be called a 'spectral aesthetic'; and finally, it asks what this specific case study can contribute to studies of what cultural critics are calling the 'spectral turn'. In this way it demonstrates that the figure of the revenant presents a particular challenge to the cultural amnesia of the present, serving as a reminder of the extent to which significant histories can be overwritten in the dominant political interest. In this it feeds into widespread debates in cultural philosophy which address the end of utopia, the future of Marxism or the significance of post-secularism in contemporary thought. It also contributes to a discussion of concerns of perennial importance in any society at any time: loss, memory and mourning. Finally, it aims to show that, in cultural terms, the return of the dead, perversely perhaps, offers a vital sign of life.