Vol. 20 · No. 1 · Issue 62 · Spring 2002 · pp. 122-130 (9)

Thomas A. Baylis

Download full article (64 KB) [subscribers only]

Abstract

A. James McAdams, Judging the Past in Unified Germany
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001)

Christiane Olivo, Creating a Democratic Civil Society in Eastern Germany: The Case of the Citizen Movements and Alliance 90 (New York: Palgrave, 2001)

A. James McAdams and Christiane Olivo have written thoughtful studies that trace the course of the German response to two very different aspects of the GDR's past. McAdams analyzes the official quest for "retrospective justice" in dealing with the Communist era; Olivo examines the philosophical underpinnings and subsequent political fortunes of the ideas and approaches animating the Bürgerbewegungen (citizens' movements) that briefly took center stage in the protests that brought down the former regime. Both the sought-after reckoning with the Communist past and the attempt to build on the legacy of the citizens' movements became caught up in the politics and the complex psychology of the eastern German-western German relationship. The course taken by both undertakings was also conditioned by the institutional realities created in the process of unification. Both have left more than their share of disappointment and frustration in their wake.