| dc.description.abstract | The museum in the Kulturbrauerei is the first German public museum which focuses on the daily life in the GDR. With this, the museum claims to be an alternative for the West-German memory on the one hand, which focuses on the dictatorship, and the East-German memory on the other, which is framed as nostalgic. With this research I want to analyse from which discourse a cultural memory of the GDR is constructed in the museum in the Kulturbrauerei. To be able to do this, I use an auto-ethnography and critical discourse analysis, in which I take the context, the actors and the social consequences of the exhibition into account. Besides this, I look at the presented memory as well as how heritage is presented. In order to do this, I use the concept of the exhibitionary complex and the authorized heritage discourse from a Foucauldian perspective, in which I analyse the constructed knowledge in the museum.
In line with earlier research on the memory of the GDR, the museum in the Kulturbrauerei constructs and normalizes a West-German discourse, in which the dictatorship is stressed, in order to secure the democracy. The museum, however uses East-Germans as a technique to normalize this West-German discourse, which is known as Aufarbeitung. Furthermore, in the museum and the foundation Haus der Geschichte as a whole, this concept of Aufarbeitung changed into a discourse in which a memory is constructed, in order to secure the western, cosmopolitical notion on neoliberal democracy in the future. By doing this, East-Germans are excluded from the memorialisation process and are constructed as ‘abnormal’. Frustration about this leads to the upcoming popularity of extreme-right political parties. In order to solve this problem, the German memory culture has to change into a discourse which is open to reflective nostalgia and different perspectives, without trying to put them into one master narrative. | |
