Aftershocks of the Past: Reunification and Resentment in East Germany (Origins) #2

Resentment may lay dormant for decades, before suddenly erupting and inundating public life. In this second episode of This Authoritarian Life, we continue to explore the ‘Origins’ of authoritarianism by asking how the past can exercise a decisive influence in and over the present. We do this by focusing on the case of East Germany, where guests 𝐀𝐧𝐧𝐚 𝐒𝐭𝐢𝐞𝐝𝐞 and 𝐄𝐥𝐬𝐤𝐞 𝐑𝐨𝐬𝐞𝐧𝐟𝐞𝐥𝐝 have conducted research and staged artistic performances.

How does the experience of a curtailed revolution inscribe itself into the human body? How does it play into East Germans’ overwhelming sense of political abandonment? And how has the far right taken advantage of all this? 

To find out, tune into the second episode of This Authoritarian Life, with Kristóf Szombati and Erdem Evren.

More about our guests' work:
Elske Rosenfeld's Archive of gestures:
www.archiveofgestures.net
Anna Stiede's Anna Medea performances:
https://annastiede.com/ANNAMEDEA-2024

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More on our partner IRGAC here: https://irgac.org/

Chapters

• 0:00 Episode Teaser & Jingle
• 1:01 Introduction to the Episode & Guests
• 4:11 The "Anna Medea" Persona & Performances
• 15:21 Digesting the Regime Change of 1989
• 24:52 The Curtailed Revolution
• 29:10 The Far Right as the Spokesperson of Discontent
• 40:22 Emotions as Political Battlefield
• 47:00 The "Archive of Gestures"
• 56:58 Takeaways
• 1:02:34 Acknowledgements

Transcript

Guest 1:

I read some articles which say that the problem of the AFD and the right-wing uprising is that they are emotionalizing some problems, and I think this is a wrong analysis.

Guest 2:

The whole narrative of the revolution being incomplete or having been cut short wasn't given a space either. The AFD could go around and put up billboards saying complete the revolution, which should have been a left-wing project, but it's been taken over by the right.

Host 1:

You're listening to This Authoritarian Life, a podcast in which we explore everyday human stories to make sense of authoritarian politics. My name is Kristóf Szombati.

Host 2:

And I'm Erdem Evren. This episode was sponsored by the Rosa-Luxemburg-Stiftung and was produced in cooperation with the International Research Group on Authoritarianism and Country-strategies. In the last episode, we focused on space in the context of the Hungarian countryside to be able to make sense of the origins of authoritarianism. In this episode, we'll focus more on time in the context of East Germany, thinking the past and the present and the relations between the two. In recent months, the far-right authoritarian nationalist AFD, Alternative for Germany, made unprecedented gains in the state elections in the former eastern provinces in Germany. More recently, Germany celebrated the 35th anniversary of the Wende, or the turning point in English, that refers to the regime change in 1989-1990. The end of the German Democratic Republic and its unification with West Germany is to this day narrated in the mainstream media and politics as a happy end. We therefore want to connect the past and future by asking, how does the past continue to figure in the present, and what kind of power does it exercise over the present?

Host 1:

Counter-intuitively, we'll start with the present. But before we jump in, I'll let Erdem introduce our two guests, or the first one at least.

Host 2:

So we have two guests who are both from East Germany and who both work as artists. Despite this common background, they also come from different generations, one of them being born in 1974, the other just before the fall of the Berlin Wall. So our first guest is Elske Rosenfeld. Elske is an artist and author living in Berlin, although she grew up in Halle. The primary focus and material for her artistic production are the histories of state socialism, its dissidences, and the revolution of 1989-1990. Her ongoing project, The Vocabulary of Revolutionary Gestures investigates how political events manifest and come to be archived in the bodies of their protagonists. Welcome to This Authoritarian Life, Elske.

Guest 2:

Hi.

Host 1:

And I'll introduce Anna. So we also have Anna Stiede. You were born a bit later than Elske, I think 1987, if I remember correctly, also on the east side of the wall, so to speak, in Jena. You also trained as a communication trainer, but you're primarily really a performance artist, you're a performer. And you're associated with a theater collective called Panzerkreuzer Rotkäppchen. And your artistic work, to me, it seems like it focuses very strongly on the body as a container of experience, which can be investigated to learn about the ways in which the past conditions influences us. And most recently, you have been going around East Germany with a particular performance that is focusing on complaints, which I think is a great entry point for this discussion. And before we jump into it, I just want to play maybe 20 seconds from one of your rehearsals for this performance. So here's the extract.

[extract from Anna's performance plays]

So of course, it goes on for 20 minutes. But can you tell us what you're saying here and what you're doing in the performance?

Guest 1:

Yeah, so thank you. I can identify with what you were saying about my work. And this is a character. It's called Anna Medea, this character. And it's complaining, but maybe it's better the word mourning or to belly-ack or to gumble, or to gumble. I was doing a research about English translation for meckern or schimpfen. And Anna Medea is grumbling or belly-aching about what is going wrong, what went wrong in the past, like that the clubhouse is closed, that there's again a change of everything. There's again money changing. There's no job anymore. There is no bakery anymore. There are no buses going, bringing you to the bigger city. And Anna Medea is talking like that for 10 or 15 minutes. And yeah, so I was interested in creating something like a Wutbürgerin, like an angry citizen, because there was a picture, what was that? I don't know how it was for you, Elske, but for me, there was a strong figure in when I was growing up, and it was a Jammer-Ossi. And this was--

Host 1:

Like a complaining Easterner, right?

Guest 1:

Yeah, East German people complaining. And this was for over 30 years, a degradation of political expression, I have to say. So I was interested in the last years to do a research about this, what's going on when people are grumbling, and maybe what we can find out also if we make it bigger, this grumbling, if there are not maybe also some desires or wishes inside.

Host 1:

So where did Anna Medea go? Which places in East Germany did Anna Medea visit and when?

Guest 1:

Yeah, so you played something out of a rehearsal that I did in February in front of the Bahnhof, Eastern Bahnhof here in Berlin. And then I go over to, I went to Gera, what is in Thuringia, in May. And there I founded also a choir of grumbling people with other colleagues and artists. And there we did a performance in front of the theater, because you have to know that in Gera every week, every Monday, there are right-wing people doing a demonstration in Gera, and they end up in front of the theater. So for me, it was a big and an important chance to take the square and to like try to overwrite also some, yeah, this square. And then after Gera, we went to Erfurt, to the, we were invited from the Phoenix Theater Festival in Erfurt Nord.

Host 1:

Also in Thuringia?

Guest 1:

Also in Thuringia. Then we went over to Dresden.

Host 1:

To Saxony?

Guest 1:

To Saxony. There we were in the center. It was a really difficult square for me because this is a square where the Pegida demonstrations, the big right-wing demonstrations in 2014-15 started.

Host 1:

Against Muslim immigration primarily.

Guest 1:

Exactly. And yeah, we had a rehearsal time in between in a small, small village in the forests of Thuringia in Mötzelbach. This was really nice where we were rehearsing three days together. And then we went over to Halle.

Host 1:

Which is in Sachsen-Anhalt, another region of East Germany.

Guest 1:

Yeah. And now we will go over to Suhr in Thuringia and Gota and Eisenach. We, in the beginning of December, we have a small, we will continue our tour.

Host 1:

Yeah. So tell us, oh sorry.

Host 2:

No, I was going to ask the same thing. So like, what kind of people did you encounter? Where did you meet during these performances? And like, what were some of the strongest experiences?

Guest 2:

Can I just clarify? Because I think we forgot to mention, which is important apart from the place, the name of the place is that you always went to public spaces.

Guest 1:

Oh yeah, that's true.

Guest 2:

So it's not in a theater, it's not in any kind of institution, but maybe you can even speak about the kind of places I only saw you and had a Neustadt in the space was very specific. But yeah, just to bring that in, because I think it's important to answer Erdem's questions with that in mind.

Guest 1:

Yeah, that's true, because yeah, of course, I like theatres, but I'm also really interested in the public squares and public spaces. So for me, it was important that Anna Medea and now the choir also took some space in public areas. So in Erfurt and in Halle, it was a specific building, how do you call it, Plattenbau?”

Guest 2:

Prefab housing, estate.

Guest 1:

So, for example, in Halle Neustadt during the GDR, there were living like 94,000 people, and now there are like 45,000 people. So you can imagine that there's so much emptiness. And it's a little bit the same in Erfurt Nord. You feel that there was more life than there is now, there are many supermarkets, many construction areas. There's a lot of Beton [concrete] everywhere. And yeah, I'm playing, and I try to catch the people that are walking by, who wants to go shopping, who wants to get their children from the kindergarten. So it's a coincidence.

Host 1:

Anna used the term GDR, that'll come back, I think, in the discussion. It's the German Democratic Republic from before 1990. Yeah, so there's just very little life, is my sense, often in these spaces. And maybe that has changed over the past years. We can talk about that. But so, yeah, what are these encounters like? Like, what's your strongest experience and encounter you had in one of these cities, maybe?

Guest 1:

Yeah, because it's true, the squares look like empty, but still there are many people. So there are people living, and you just have the, you have something to consume there. You can go shopping, but there's no possibility to come together or to create something. So I was interested to offer something or to open a space and invite people to put some life in the squares. I just opened the space and invited them to talk about what they don't like in the actual situation. So Anna Medea is always repeating, oh, it's "doch kacke", like this is shitty. And it's repeating it, repeating it, repeating it, and at a certain point also asking the people there, what do you not like? And then sometimes people are shaking their heads that they agree with what Anna Medea is saying. And sometimes they put also words inside what they are missing, like, ah, "it's shitty that the tickets for the public services are so expensive". "It's shitty that here is no swimming pool anymore". "It's shitty that we don't have a place for teenagers to come together anymore". So, yeah, it was really interesting that people took part in it and resonated to this offer. And I think what was really interesting for me is that they took part even if they didn't know me and or even if they didn't know the other peoples around. So this was also really interesting for me that we don't have spaces anymore where we debate in the public with people who are strangers to us.

Host 2:

Like two things come to my mind from what you just said. Like on the one hand, it sounds as if people are expressing their feelings of desperation and deprivation, that some of the social services, some of the facilities, some of the infrastructures that they used to have do not exist anymore, and they are basically complaining about this, is what I understand. And the second interesting thing is that people just want to be heard, and people just want to speak, I guess. They just also want to voice these grievances, these resentments, these things that affect their lives basically. I think this is the reason why this Anna Medea works so well, actually.

Guest 1:

Yeah, it's true. There are a lot of people really need to talk. Like, this is my general impression.

Guest 2:

Yeah, yeah, I totally share that. And it's weird because there has been a lot more talk about East German experiences in the last, I would say, four or five years. When I started working and doing events, I had this feeling that there was this bottomless well of like, almost pressure cooked experience that hasn't been expressed publicly. So I think what you're doing, and other people are doing it in similar ways, is just to sort of give a space for these sentiments to be heard. It's so important that I'm really fascinated that it's still, it's still going on. And there's always this sort of idea that it should be enough. And now people say "we've spoken enough about East Germany". This starts five minutes after they've started talking to East Germans. But there is this really strong sense of the need to express yourself in public. And it's this fantastic offer that you pick up on to take this as an offer of people to say, we are here and we are prepared to speak to you. And you're creating this space and also, so you're making an offer, but also the people coming and responding to you are responding to that offer and also being generous. So I think that's what's so nice about your project, is that it sort of takes this urge, collective urge to speak and it gives it space.

Host 1:

So what is behind this urge and what are the emotions that haven't been expressed or are still looking for an avenue?

Guest 1:

So I think it is fear, it's fear of social insecurity, because I really felt that people are really, really unsatisfied. People are stressed of old age poverty, because they do not have so much renten points, pension, they don't have so much pension credits as maybe people in Western Germany. So there's a lot of fear, I think there's also sadness, because it's interesting what you said, Elske, that maybe you think, it's enough now and you don't have to talk about these East German problems. But no, there's still a lot of energy that needs to be expressed. And I always say, I think, there's still a lot of sadness, because there was no funeral of the GDR, there was no ritual that said bye bye to the GDR. And I think this is a big thing, so I really feel always also kind of a sadness. And what was interesting with Anna Medea, I found also out that to bellyache and to talk about subjectivity in this Eastern German context is a kind of digestion. So, there are, it's important that there is still a need of digest this transformation, in a way. And this was interesting for me, because this, is doch kacke, works with a strong kk, kk, kk, which comes from the belly, from the belly.

Host 1:

The diaphragm.

Guest 1:

From the diaphragm. And so I found it out, it's, yeah, it's kind of a digestion also. It's also an offer of that to digest collectively, and not individually at home.

Host 1:

So how come, how come it's, I'm just wondering, how come that we're 30 years down the line?

Host 2:

35.

Host 1:

35, to be precise. Thank you, yeah. And the digestion is still ongoing. So do you have an idea of why that can be?

Host 2:

Maybe to add to that, like, what sort of an experience was the unification or the end of the GDR that, you know, people still feel that that process somehow was not complete, or, as you said, that they didn't properly bury the East German state, basically. And also, what were your experiences, personal experiences of the unification, and then its aftermath? I mean, you were born in 1987, right?

Guest 1:

True, yeah. And I was born in Jena, and yeah, it's a big question. My personal experience, like, I just, I think I started also my work with the GDR and Eastern Germany a lot with, also through the work that, like, colleagues like Eske made years before. And then I started to do more research about people who were in the opposition in the GDR. And then at a certain point, I realized, ah, it's not my GDR. I was just looking so much on, on the experiences of other people in GDR, then I looked more to my mother and what was, what was the connection to my mother with the fall of a wall, and I think I'm really shaped by the experience of my family that my grandparents lost their jobs because the Treuhand liquidated all the...

Host 1:

So this was an agency that was responsible for actually restructuring state-owned capital and then ended up privatizing a lot of it.

Guest 1:

Exactly, and they were also responsible for the disposal and scrapping of the machines, what is really important for my work, because I have a strong connection to machines. And so I was, I'm shaped of that from the, yeah, from my family that people lost their jobs, and from kind of a depression, which was normal, like I grew up in a smaller village near Apolda. Apolda was a city which was famous for textile industry, and it was just really depressing, and everything was gray, and there was a lot of, many people with alcohol addictions around. And I always say it's like in  Anne Clark's Sleeper in Metropolis. This is a song, what is my 90s in Apolda. I don't know, this describes really good my, this, this atmosphere.

Host 1:

What can we translate that? That's difficult, right? Or can you say it again?

Guest 1:

Sleeper in Metropolis is a song, is a song from Anne Clark.

Guest 2:

Yeah, Anne Clark. She was for some reason big in East Germany in the 80s and 90s. She's not so well known in the UK, which is actually hilarious because she is British, but she was a big, she was the first concert I went to after the world came down. So maybe that's also a memory. Yeah. I won a ticket in the local newspaper. That was like a competition and I won it. It was great. Fantastic.

Host 2:

Where was that?

Guest 2:

At the Shore in Halle, which doesn't exist anymore. It was torn down.

Host 1:

So why was she big?

Guest 2:

I don't know. It was this kind of dark electro that I guess took off in Germany in a big way, without going too much into the music history now. But I think, yeah, for some reason, that maybe it is interesting to think about the psychology of that, why it was popular. And I'm not sure if it was an East German thing either, if it was East and West at the time I experienced this in East Germany. But that would be an interesting study for someone to do, right?

Guest 1:

Yeah, interesting, because I was thinking maybe it was for the reason of deindustrialization. So for me, it's the sound of deindustrialization. Which of course, yeah, happened in the UK before it happened in East Germany.

Host 1:

Did it also express this darkness that you were saying, or the grayness, or the loss, or?

Guest 2:

I mean, I think Anne Clark, for my generation, was also a positive figure despite the darkness, because she was a West, but a different West from the West we were being presented in the unification, which was the sort of conservative idea of the liberal West as kind of the redemption of the revolution and of our biggest hopes and dreams, which it obviously wasn't. So there was a big fascination with this kind of Western underground cultures from the UK. Also a bit early in the 80s, maybe this is going too far away from our subject, but for example, like Black American culture was huge when this film came out. Beat Street, a film produced by Harry Belafonte. A lot of people, my generation, say to this day that this was for them, a kind of pre-decessor of the vendor, this kind of feeling of suddenly having a voice because and this happened through identifying with black kids in New York. So there's also something interesting there. But maybe, should I answer that question about the Wende as well? Because I think it's so interesting how different generations respond to it. And we did talk about it a little bit through Anne Clarke.

Host 1:

Yeah.

Guest 2:

So my experience of, well, the Wende is a sort of malleable term, but if we speak about in the more narrow sense of the kind of changes of 89/90, then yes, I experienced that as a 15-year-old, and this sort of depression that Anna mentioned, I think for me, the most important or formative experience was the experience of this kind of turnover, this emotional turnover from this moment of self-enfranchisement, when suddenly you have the feeling that you can decide together with other people, talk about really the fundamentals of collective life. How do you want to live? I experienced this at school. So we were talking to school teachers, for example, that had been in the party and they were coming to us, and we were talking about what does it mean to have been part of the system, and how do we deal with this now, and how do we take this forward? And especially at the school, this was interesting, right? How can you think of a school without discipline, for example, in the traditional sense? All these questions came up. So there was this immense sense of empowerment. And it sort of broke off really quickly and really dramatically with this turnover towards the unification narrative. And for me, this kind of, this depression that Anna describes set in with this turnover to the unification, which is weird because on one level, it sort of seems to be the thing that people voted for and wanted, and we can talk about that more later if we want to go into more detail. But the sense of disappointment and disillusionment that Anna mentions, and that was the kind of emotional soundtrack of your childhood, began actually with this event of unification, which is being sold to us to this day as this happy ending of the revolution. And yeah, especially for my generation, who were very hopeful about this kind of self-democratization and self-enfranchisement, I think it was a big shock to the system to then be told, well, actually, what the new system told us was, it was like that there is no alternative, right? This was a neoliberal sort of dictum that came in immediately after the revolution. You're being told by the new system, which has sold itself as the democracy, the perfect democracy or the greatest possible democracy that we have, comes in and then tells you, well, actually, there is no space for political discussion because there's economic Sachzwang, like the economic necessity. So the Treuhand is an economic necessity and there's no democratic leeway for decision-making anyway. So you go from this immense upswing of decision-making collective debate to this absolute disenfranchisement of neoliberalism, and that for me is the experience of 1990.

Host 2:

So, and what did you do with this disappointment that on the one hand, it was such an empowering moment in the beginning, and then there was this big disappointment of that there is just a neoliberal reunification? Because I was wondering also, how is it possible that today we have these energies of fear and hate and angriness, which has to do maybe with this disappointment, but yeah, why it was not possible to heal this disappointment?

Guest 2:

Well, how do you heal this kind of disappointment? I think you have to make it productive, and that's what people, I think, like you and me, are still trying to do in an abstract way. But yeah, I don't know if we want to go into sort of the Wende, because that was more for your second part of the discussion.

Host 1:

Yeah, no, we should. We should, because this shift from euphoria to disappointment is important to talk a bit more about it. How fast did that come about?

Guest 2:

Yeah, it happened so quickly. I mean, the demonstrations essentially turned from pro-freedom, well, first of all, demonstrations against the Eastern regime, then were the demonstrations that took over, took more the sort of nationalist direction in some ways. But then in parallel already in the early 1990 and from 1991, for sure, the demonstrations continued, the so-called Monday demonstrations, and became about these political and economic grievances about the privatization and the loss of jobs. So this sort of protest essentially continued. So it's also sort of wrong to say that the revolution ended with the unification. It continued. So the sort of politicization of the population, I think, continued for much longer than it's sort of historically accounted for in the story of the happy unification.

Host 2:

I mean, there were many, many strikes, right?

Guest 2:

There were hundreds. Hundreds of strikes. For the first four years after unification, there was a massive strike wave. And that's where the interesting thing, this figure of the Jammer-Ossi became so important because it was a way, it came up almost immediately, this sort of construction of the East German as the perpetual, on the one hand, unpolitical, undemocratic, and at the same time perpetually complaining person. And this was a very clever way of disavowing and actually making unreadable this kind of discontent that was going on, and that was feeding into this mass protest movement of the early 90s, which to me is a clear continuation of the revolution. But it's not generally considered as that. So there was a stigmatization of protest. And the sad and horrible thing is that East German discontent started being noticed when it turned right wing.

Guest 1:

Exactly.

Guest 2:

Which is five years, which is now 10 years ago, Pegida, yeah. And since then, we have a discussion about East German grievances that is not just dismissing East German grievances as something odd or stupid or pathological. I mean, just to bring in this nice story of the psychological manual of psychological diseases, they made a disease out of it. There's in the International Manual of Psychological Diseases, there's something called the post-traumatic embitterment syndrome, which was a phrase and a term coined by a West German, West Berliner psychotherapist who created this condition. So the discontent was not only negated, it was also pathologized. And now it comes out in this right-wing form, unfortunately.

Host 1:

But there's a puzzle here. I'm just stepping back a bit because, so the Venda was characterized by a major loss of mostly industrial jobs, right? Like your family seems to have been impacted. But then if we go back or forward in time, and especially nowadays, you know, everyone says Brandenburg is actually not doing so badly economically. There's all this investment coming and people actually have more money to spend than they used to. So how does that come together with still this disappointment that both of you have recognized and your work deals with?

Host 2:

And if I can, if I may add something else, so in places like Brandenburg or Thuringia, it's not only people in their 40s, 50s, 60s who actually vote for AFD. I mean, it's actually young people who seem to be kind of supporting AFD or other right-wing far-right groups. And many of these people haven't even experienced the event actually of these young people. So like, what is this exactly? Is it some kind of generationally transmitted trauma, sadness, depression, or something else?

Guest 1:

Yeah, I would say there is something like a transmission through generations, because I was also shocked by the votes and from realizing that, okay, the people with whom I was going to school, like every third person is voting for AfD. And why are they doing that? And then I realized, okay, yeah, we were all shaped by this transformation. And so I think there is a big power of, we don't want to be, we don't want to come back in the situation where our parents or our grandparents were in, something like that. And there is also, I don't know how, what do you think about this, Elsker, but I think there is also a strong thing of for 30 years or 35 years, no one listened to us. They called us Jammer-Ossi. They did not take us politically seriously. And now we are very, very strong, and there is a strong, strong positive process of identification with the East and with Eastern Germany and with, like, you know, with symbols of the GDR, with the car, with the Trabi. And there is a kind of nostalgic identification with the East or Eastern German. What does, what has something to do also with, with, in Germany, you say, you call it Trotz. Like, there is something, how do you call it in English? Like, this emotion of..

Host 1:

Grudge, or no?

Guest 2:

No, it's, I can't think of the word right now. It's more this kind of like, I do it anyway. I do it to show you, what's the word.

Guest 1:

It's something like, it's a childish way, I would say. Yeah. For example, Dirk Oschmann, this professor, wrote this book about the East as an invention of the West. And I think this book was really the best example for that, like empowering a kind of, I would say, childish identification with the East. And yeah, I don't know how to explain it in another way.

Host 1:

It's kind of this, like this opposition, but this childish opposition. If you say yes, I'll say no, right?

Guest 2:

Yeah, it is that. It's just performing the Jammer-Ossi in a way. So the Jammer-Ossi is, in that sense, it's not a one-way ascription or street. It's also being performed, in the debate that we see right now, that this kind of like, I don't care what you think.

Host 1:

Exactly. It's an answer to the stigma to being stigmatized. So it's like, I'll take the stigma, I'll put it on my head, and then I'll give you what you deserve, kind of, from that position.

Guest 2:

Something like that.

Guest 1:

Yeah, it's interesting. I think something like that happened. And it's not really interested in the world or something. It's like really closed. It's a closing performance. It's not really a thing.

Host 1:

But the fuel of that is discontent, right? It reminds me very much of Trumpism in the US, of what's driving that. Those are similar energies of a big, I mean, for big fuck you in a way, of like, I don't care about the consequences of my identification with, I mean, it's the right mostly these days, but it was the left previously. "You may think that that's disgusting or primitive or whatever, but we are going to espouse it nevertheless, because we're so discontent", right? So it's discontentment that is driving that, is my sense. But I don't know, maybe there are other things. I mean, Elske, you started speaking of this, the Wende being, as I heard, you kind of hijacked towards reunification, to kind of the West Germans saying, well, it's not really two parts coming together half-half, but you have to become like us, like that's the project. So in a way, you just become like us and integrate, and then everything will be fine. And maybe there's some, again, I don't know what we could call that resentment that's borne out of that being pulled into that tunnel, and then being constantly kind of even policed, whether you're really integrating and doing your job of becoming this new German or whether you're not delivering on that. So maybe those energies have been kind of stifled by the so-called democratic political regime, and maybe the right is using these energies today.

Guest 2:

Yeah, this is the real political failure, I would say, in the sense that this content has not been picked up on by left of the center forces. Because I think a lot of people's grievances have the potential to point, or pointed things that need solutions. And they also point at a sort of potential of protest. And it took the form of protest, like I said, in the early 90s, that were by no means right-wing protests. But both the revolution of 89 and the discontent and the frustration and the trauma that happened afterwards have been ignored by the political mainstream and, unfortunately, also the political left, which is quite shocking and sad. If you talk about political mainstream, the main problem was that the media, because of the specific German situation of the unification, which was different from Hungary, for example, you had an existing elite sort of in the media, but also in politics and in institutions, and it just expanded from West Germany. So there was literally no forum where East Germans could communicate about, for example, questions like, how do we deal with this fact that we were part of this kind of undemocratic, dictatorial, and often violent and oppressive system? These questions, hard questions, were never addressed and never discussed because the public space, in the sense of a sort of media space or theaters or whatever, was largely taken over by West German actors. Who had no sensitivity to these issues, so there was no space to deal with these things. And as regards to revolution, the whole narrative of the revolution being incomplete or having been cut short, wasn't given a space either. So, in 2019, the AFD could go around and put up billboards saying, for end of the event, to complete the revolution, which should have been a left-wing project, but it's been taken over by the right as a talking point. And for me, that was both shocking and interesting, because I'd been going around saying, there is something left over from that experience of the revolution that sits in people's bodies, and that was an emancipatory project that was cut short, and that was incomplete, and why are we not talking about this? And then it takes the right wing to come and talk to people and say, we see this, we hear this, and we're giving it space. And that for me is the real tragedy of the specific German take on the right-wing drift, which we obviously see in other countries and in West Germany as well. But there are these aspects to it that I think are kind of homemade and specific to the East German context.

Host 1:

Right. So like, I'm looking at you, Anna, and then yes, then you fire away. But it really this reminds me of your performances. Because there is kind of an undigested, something that can't come out from the body and that can't be verbalized that gets stuck in the system, so to speak. And your performances are exactly trying to give voice to that. And yours too, Elske. The gestures, right?

Guest 2:

We can talk about that, but I would like to hear from Anna. Because it's true that we both work with the body very much, and I think that's an interesting connection between the projects. But I would like to hear from Anna first.

Host 1:

So maybe Anna go first, and then ask her to say a bit about those gestures.

Guest 2:

Yeah, now also I read some articles who say that the problem of the AfD and the right-wing uprising is that they are emotionalizing some problems. And I think this is a wrong analysis. Why do we not take emotions and physical effects as political? So, and I think maybe in Eastern Germany, some emotions or physical gestures were oppressed in the last 30 or 35 years, or also like there was this thing, I don't do that, you have to do it like that, or you have to do it like that. When I was moving from Eastern Germany to Western Germany where I was studying, my mother told me, don't do that, don't do that, don't do that, do not put on the washing machine in the evening, because in Western Germany, they do not wash in the evening. You know, something like that. Or people, I really try not to speak in another way when I was at Western Germany in university, I really tried to hide my Eastern German dialect. And these are just two small examples, like, so I think, yeah, we have history in our bodies, and we have social conditions in our bodies. And I think the only thing we can do is to, yeah, do research and to work with our bodies and with the effects that we have inside us. So because these are, like, we are, yeah, we are like containers of history and social conditions. And it's, and I think this is the only way we could work through to digest what happened. So this is what I'm thinking about. And because maybe there are also some, in Eastern Germany, some, yeah, some beasts or something with whom we have to work on, because you have to imagine, it's really a strategy that society has no instruments of bringing people together and make them talking about such big transformations that happened in Germany. And it's also, I would agree to what Elsker says, is such a big strategy that also left-wing movements in Western Germany had no big interest to see the strikes, for example, or to see this radical democracy moments in Eastern Germany. So...

Host 2:

But I have a question, then, like Linke, the left party, obviously, they were actually quite strong in eastern states, provinces for quite a long time. But in the past five, six years, even the left party is not gaining any votes anymore. So, I mean, there is the Sahra Wagenknecht, the Bündnis Sahra Wagenknecht that we can talk about. But like, why is it that even those leftists who are, some many of them are from the East, and many of them had and still have some footing in these places, are losing, bleeding all these votes, all this support basically?

Guest 2:

I think because also the left-wing party didn't have any instrument to take bodies and emotions as political area or as a political battlefield. Like in 2019, I was shocked when I was, for the last elections in Brandenburg, there were posters where it was written, angreness is not a good political feeling from the Partei Die Linke. And I was just like shocked because I was wondering, why do you give this strong emotions to the right now? Because there are so many aspects why Eastern German people are angry. So why are you doing that? So I think it's a problem of the political left in Germany, that they really don't want to have to do anything with emotions or with bodies. So this would be my answer. But I don't know what do you think and what is your interest in physical, in the physical approach or physical research?

Guest 1:

Yeah, I mean, I totally agree that, I mean, a materialist analysis is important, but it's not enough when it comes to these sort of affective reactions. I mean, I work with the body for the same reason, that I find certain things are almost impossible to address in the vocabularies that we have for them today, especially about the revolution, because it was cut short. And so whatever new political practices, and there were many, and political ideas were taking shape in the revolution, never reached a stage where they were actually formulated into a new political language or a new political vocabulary. So that's why I also work with this word vocabulary of gestures, which is the previous project now is called Archive of Gestures, but it's essentially the same project. And the starting point of that was very personal. It was just this experience that I had of this very powerful, formative, political experience that shaped my life of this revolution, of this enfranchisement, which I talked about earlier, and then the lack of language for it. And then when I started interviewing people about this, when I started working on this in 2007, 8, 9, I noticed that this is true for lots of people, even people that are critical of the official narrative of the unification, or of the revolution as unification, there is a kind of almost self-belittling attitude to one's own political hopes in 89, 90. So protagonists, I heard this again recently, people will say, yeah, we were, we were naive to think that these dreams we had could be realized. So, and what I noticed when people make these statements that are really kind of like closing down a certain experience, their bodies don't cooperate, their bodies get excited, and they get happy and they get angry and they're animated. And this for me was a starting point to think about working with the body as a historical archive. And the other reason that I work with gestures is also like a kind of almost anecdotal one, which is that when I was starting to work with this material from 89 in 2011, then the Arab Spring happened, and I suddenly had this experience, and Erdem, we had conversations about this after the Gezi Park protests, that there were certain things that kept repeating themselves in these different revolutions, in these hugely different, vastly different geographical and historical contexts. And so the gestures that I work with function both as a way of sort of relating embodied knowledge and language, but also as a way of connecting different historical experiences of revolutions. For example, just to make it sort of more to illustrate a bit what I mean, it's like maybe the gesture of circling.

Guest 1:

Yeah, I love your work, the circling.

Guest 2:

I work with a video that I shot in Cairo in 2012, so let's say one of the endpoints, one can debate when the revolution spring ended in Egypt, but it was after a big bout of protests. We were circling around Tahrir Square, and so I've played in my work a lot with this gesture of circling as revolution, revolving as a circling, but also this fact that you sort of revolve and then you do a big circling, and then you feel that you've come back to the beginning, which is also something that people tell after all these history, all these revolutionary experiences like, well, we've experienced this crazy thing, but we feel that we're back at square one. And then the spring takes us into three-dimensionality. So you suddenly have a distance between the starting point and the end point, and there is a stored energy, like literally a physical energy in between the two points if you think of it as a spring. So I play with these kind of figures of circling, and then circling is also spinning, the body spinning out of control, and this sort of idea of losing the social coordinates. So it's very rich in a way that it allows me to actually try to verbalize, or not even sometimes I perform, so it's not all that it translates into the verbal, but the way of reworking specific historical experiences in a way that's, on the one hand, historically specific and grounded in my own biography, but also universal in the sense of looking at resonances, let's say, between historical instances and how they play out.

Host 1:

But if we take this discussion to the political level and look at the far right and the left, it seems to me, based on what you're saying, that the right is just so much better at doing the circling in its own way, right? Like what you said, promising to finish the project of the venda of the regime change, whereas the left, it seems to me, is only really playing on nostalgia, but doesn't really have a vision for the future to offer. Whereas the right is saying, look, there's a new beginning here, that's possible. And the roots of that new beginning are in, as always on the right, in kind of German history, the body of the German nation as a space of renewal. So going back and cutting off the foreign kind of elements on the body, I see that very much so, where, and I don't see that promise of a new beginning in either the Linke, so the left-wing parties project, which is, as Erdem said, is kind of dying now, or this new formation, this left conservative formation of Sahra Wagenknecht, which is very new and is kind of promising to hold German society together with more solidarity, but really not wanting any immigrants to come and wanting those who are here to become good Germans. I mean, I'm simplifying, but it's another project that plays, but these are nostalgic. Do you agree or do you see this difference between right and left? And we can go to the street. We can go back to the street. Like, Anna, you mentioned that, it was in Gera that the right is present, or I'm sure in Saxony you also saw the presence of the right. So, yeah, how do you perceive the right when you meet it? Its protagonists.

Guest 1:

Yeah, what I realized this year and what was really strong, but maybe it's also logic. But I think in West, but also in Eastern Germany, we really have a lack also of dealing with this Nazi crime and their traces, for example, in our own families. And I often or nearly every time come back to this Nazi past and of the German Nazi past and in my works also with Panzerkreuzer Rotkäppchen.

Host 1:

Which is the theater group, right?

Guest 1:

Yeah, which is our theater group. And I realized this year, because I was talking to so many people, that often there was comes out a really a language. Yeah, national socialist language. You know, this was really strong. For example, this word of people are asocial, like asozial. And I realized such a strong fetish on work and labor, like that everything is based on work and labor. I don't know, it would be interesting to make a research out of this experience in other East European countries, because in Eastern Germany, I have such a strong focus of fetish on work.

Host 1:

We talked about this in the last episode, in the context of Hungary.

Guest 1:

Yeah, exactly. Then I was thinking, oh yeah, this is interesting because it's the same. And for my point of view, it's the same in Eastern Germany. That's such a strong focus on that. Yeah, but of course, the GDR was based on work. This is the first article of the GDR Constitution. So that, and yeah, and the AfD addresses the worries of people.

Host 1:

The AfD being, sorry, we need to say it at this point, the alternative for Germany, which is the far-right party, the main far-right party.

Guest 1:

So we live in a very complex world under capitalist domination, and the AfD answers are very under complex, and they give very easy answers to what people are deserving. And they address these worries, and I would say the problem of the left is, which is quite connected to the lack of taking emotions and physical reactions as a political battlefield. The lack of the left is that they don't have good concepts of care. Like we have to really focus, I think, on how to care, and how can we create maybe also new modes of caring in society, which is not caring in an authoritarian way. I think this would be really interested, because in Eastern Germany, I often feel also that people deserve someone who tells them what to do or how to do something. And I think it would be interesting in a utopian or in a future society to find other modes of caring collectively, and not delegate this care to a state or to an authoritarian party or something.

Guest 2:

I think, I mean, these languages are being hashed out. I think especially if you think about feminist and queer scenes and the kind of collectivities that are doing this, practicing this. What I think is needed and there, the revolution of 89 is, is for me always the starting point of thinking this, is to make this, to take this out of the small group, out of the bubble. Because I think we have, we're starting to formulate vocabularies, but they need to be shared, and they need to be taken out of Berlin and into different spaces. And they need to, and I mean, that's why I love what you do, that you make yourself vulnerable by venturing out of the safe spaces, and you put yourself physically out there in the big square, and you stand there with your body, and you sort of make yourself a vessel of certain conversations. And it is a form of care. And I think for all four of us, I think what we probably share that we have access to certain experiences and vocabularies of care that have been developed in our left wing and queer feminist context. But I think for my work, at least, I feel a strong urge to take this vocabulary out of the bubble of Berlin, where it's very easy to feel very comfortable in this. But this is just to say that I think the vocabularies are being hashed out, and they're probably being hashed out in Gera and Jena and Halle as well. And maybe in ways that are not so easily recognizable to a traditional contemporary left. By traditional, I mean kind of a left that stays within its own concerns and languages. And I think that's sort of the task, really, is to build these kind of practices and expand them beyond the immediate comfort zone.

Guest 1:

Yeah, that's true.

Host 1:

So we're going to try to kind of summarize what we learned today. This is kind of the way we do it. So one of the things that for me was the strongest experience from this discussion, my takeaway, like going back to Anna's work, you know, on the body and your work with the diaphragm and the voice is that there is repressed kind of emotions and experiences that could not be really spoken and heard at the same time after the regime change, after the Wende. And that these energies, when they can't be expressed, still have an enormous power. And they stayed there waiting to come out in different forms. And that can take even 35 years to come out. And then it takes very many different directions. And I think we... But go ahead, Erdem.

Host 2:

No, just in relation to that, I mean, one striking point that Elske made is that, you know, the experience of 89-90 as a revolution, as this, you know, sense of enfranchisement, this sense of, you know, self-control, management, creativity, all these things that we also know from the Gezi park uprising and the Arab revolutions and everything, you know, these have been completely ignored, completely glossed over by mainstream media, by the mainstream institutions for such a long time. And Anna was also adding that, you know, the sort of the effective responses of East Germans after the unification, they're also ignored by not only mainstream political parties, but even those kind of left projects or some of the left political parties. So I think both of these things are very important for how a community is kind of constructed as a political community in the present.

Host 1:

Right.

Host 2:

And basically, the AFD is apparently better at capturing these intensities, these energies, these effects, these histories in quite destructive but unfortunately successful ways.

Guest 2:

Yeah, but we should also say that it's a mistranslation, no? I mean, that's a point I make in the book that I'm working on, that the AFD is picking up on effects that have been left unaddressed by the mainstream and the political left, but they're also offering a completely fake or toxic answer to them, which is to turn, which is antithetical to the revolutionary spirit of maximal inclusion and openness. And instead, this is what the AFD is continuing, just to make that point, is not the vendor, it's actually the nationalistic project of unified Germany and taking that to the extreme of like we are the ethnic Germans and so on, and with all these, which is a complete perversion of the revolutionary idea of "Wir sind ein Volk", essentially. And it's also a perversion of, there's no answering to the questions of care, I would say, because they really, really hold on a level of fear and anxiety. So I think there's no progressive way of, yeah, resolving something in a careful way and in a way of solidarity.

Host 2:

I don't know if it fits, but as we were discussing it with Kristóf today, I thought cruel optimism, this concept actually fits here. It was kind of coined by this American, this late American thinker, Lauren Berlain. And cruel optimism basically describes a relation that exists when something that you desire is an obstacle for your flourishing. And I thought it kind of describes in certain ways the ways in which we explore the entanglements between the past and the present in this episode. That we can think of this as how the desires attached to unification was some kind of or became some kind of cruel optimism. And we can talk about it in the more contemporary times basically in the context of East Germany.

Host 1:

Cruel because it was hijacked and kind of didn't take the project seriously, or people's desires seriously, right? Just to add to that.

Host 2:

And cruel because it will hurt people. It hurts people and it will continue to hurt people in many ways and others.

Host 1:

So I think the last word is, if we try to look at what we did here today, it's a very different narrative we were building to the classic, looking at the eye of the day through the lens of the immigration problem, so to speak. Right? I think just to say to our listeners that we deliberately didn't take that path because it's so well-known. And obviously, we could have brought it in, in different parts of this conversation, like in how public space has been transformed since there are newcomers who live in these cities mostly and are visible there and have new lives, and how they're transforming social life. So there's a whole conversation to be had over that. So thank you very much to both of you.

Host 2:

Thank you so much. This episode was sponsored by the Rosa-Luxemburg-Stiftung and was produced in cooperation with the IRGAC Research Group on Authoritarianism and Counter-strategies.

Host 1:

We would also like to thank podcaster Martin Fischer, who gave us really invaluable advice. Martin has a highly popular German language podcast called Staatsbürgerkunde, which deals with the history of the German Democratic Republic. We would really encourage you to have a listen. And finally, we would like to name the people who helped us actually make this episode. And they are Vera Jónás and Shai Levy, who are responsible for sound engineering and mastering. Polina Georgescu, who designed the logo. And Anna Szilágyi, who is our in-house comms expert, whose role is to help us move away from our academic tongue.