The divided past

Viac o knihe

This book tackles head on the central problems of writing German post-war history in the aftermath of unification. Since 1990, historians have been debating whether the development of the Federal Republic and the East German State constituted separate histories or whether they share what should be considered a joint past. This is a book that confronts the need for historiography to break away from the traditional master narrative. It offers an alternative in the form of the differing points of view necessary to gain a new perspective on the central problem of a separate, yet joint, German postwar history. Drawing on both methodological and historiographical approaches, authors tackle this vexed problem in the context of generational and woman's history, secularization, the labor movement, and the legitimization of the "workers' state", and culminate by addressing the perennial question: how does a nation live with catastrophe?