WHO IS POLAND’S WESTERN NEIGHBOUR? CLASS, CULTURE AND GERMAN IMAGINED COMMUNITIES THIRTY YEARS AFTER DIE WENDE

Abstract

The article discusses trajectories of identity-making processes taking place in the area of the Germanspeaking countries. It investigates the historical dimension of the transformative processes of German identities paying particular attention to the post-WWII case of Eastern Germany and the socialist politics of forging a classless society. Based on the fieldwork carried out in Sachsen-Anhalt, Brandenburg and Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, the author explores the implications such politics have for the self-identification practices and discourses of both eastern and western Germans nearly thirty years after die Wende. In so doing, the paper investigates the historical conditions of ethno-cultural tradition which enabled the emergence of the German nation. In the German model, a nation emerges despite administrative fragmentation: it is understood as an ethno-cultural unity which finds its expression in a political unity. Challenges to this model appeared first after the WWI with the emergence of the Austrian Republic, and later, after the WWII, when Austria was forced to remodel its political and cultural identity and reject any connection with the German ethnic identity compromised with the Nazi past. Structurally analogical processes were employed in the GDR, which, by the fact of developing in a socialist ideological environment, engendered a sense of belonging to a separate (national) identity among the subsequent generations of its inhabitants, despite the fact of sharing a common tradition with the western neighbors. The article thus highlights two different categories which together galvanize the identity-making process in contemporary eastern Germany: an ethno-cultural one and a social-ideological one.