The GDR Today

The GDR Today promotes interdisciplinary approaches to East Germany by gathering articles from a new generation of scholars in the fields of literary and visual studies, history, sociology, translation studies, political science, museum studies and curating practice. The contributors to this volume argue that it is necessary to transgress disciplinary boundaries to escape the gridlocked categories of GDR scholarship. Exploring East German everyday life, cultural policies, memory and memorialization, the volume aims to reinvigorate the study of the GDR. Through the combination and juxtaposition of different approaches to East Germany, it overcomes intra-disciplinary conceptual binaries and revitalizes debates about the very concepts we use to understand life under late twentieth-century state socialism.

Stephan Ehrig is a Teaching Fellow in German at Durham University. His PhD thesis examined the reception of Heinrich von Kleist in GDR literature and theatre at the University of Bristol. He has previously published in the Kleist Jahrbuch and Literaturkritik and his monograph Der dialektische Kleist was published in March 2018.

Marcel Thomas is Departmental Lecturer in Twentieth-Century European History at St Antony’s College, University of Oxford. He completed his PhD at the University of Bristol in 2017. His thesis, «Local Lives, Parallel Histories: Villagers and Everyday Life in the Divided Germany», is the first comparative study of how East and West German villagers experienced and navigated social change in their localities in the postwar era. He has previously published in the Journal of Urban History and the European Review of History.

David Zell is Research Associate at the Institute for German Studies, University of Birmingham. He was awarded his PhD in German Studies at the University of Birmingham in 2018, with a thesis titled «Major Cultural Commemorations and the Construction of Cultural and Political Identity in the GDR, 1959–83». He has also contributed to the Significance of the Centenary project, an interdisciplinary, cross-sector series of workshops bringing together museum practitioners and academics from several British universities to contextualize, compare and convey the significance of centenaries.