Making sense of East Germany’s 1968: Multiple trajectories and contrasting memories

Abstract

This article investigates contrasting memories of East Germany’s 1968 based on a sample of six life story interviews. Given the iconic events of West Germany’s 1968, there has been a growing interest in the events happened on the other side of the Iron Curtain. In unified Germany, however, commemorations of 1968 in the German Democratic Republic have focused on a particular type of 68er biography: those who broke with the regime as a result of the Warsaw Pact’s invasion of Czechoslovakia on 21 August 1968 and chose to pursue various forms of opposition in its wake. This article lends more nuance to the subject by examining three individuals who chose this path alongside three others who followed a different trajectory. The crushing of the Prague Spring and their own imprisonment for protesting against it led the latter to shun open opposition in favour of pursuing change from within official structures. By highlighting the plurality of East German experiences and memories of this period, this article seeks to make a contribution both to the study of the international 1968 and to the thriving scholarship on how the East German past is remembered in united Germany.