Text in a changing context: Reconstructing lives in East Germany

The decade following Eastern Europe's revolutionary changes has been widely characterized by an uncritical enthusiasm for "the rediscovery of memory" of those who lived under state socialism (Brossat et al 1990:7). But representations of the past which emerge in the present are precisely that, representations, with the stamp of the present upon them. Members of societies in acute social change are not only (and perhaps not even) experiencing a liberation of their memory; they are scrambling to construct new and acceptable identities for themselves, ones which will be compatible with the changed world in which they now live. The stories which they tell about themselves and their pasts are connected to this struggle to form a new identity. Thus their pasts are also products of the present, and just as certain memories are being selected as component parts of the constructed past, so are other memories excluded.