The nice Stasi man drove his Trabi to the nudist beach: Contesting East German Identity

The study which I will describe in this chapter is an attempt to make sense of a small group of life stories as told to me twice, twenty years apart, in a context of acute political change. In 1992 I conducted interviews with 40 East Germans, most of whom were anti-­‐state activists who had participated in significant ways in what has been called ‘the bloodless revolution’ of 1989. Twenty years later, in 2012, I conducted follow up interviews with 15 of the people with whom I had originally spoken. Although much has been written on the events of 1989, and the twentieth anniversary of those events was greeted with much media fanfare from around the world, there has in fact been very little investigation into the long-­‐term experiences of those who have lived through these changes. That is precisely the focus of my own study, which combines a biographical and historical focus.