Between Structure and Anti-Structure: The Anthropology of a Revolutionary "Moment," 1989–90

This paper shifts the customary scholarly focus on the relationship between high politics and the peace and human rights activists in the GDR’s urban centres to every-day life in the small town. Taking the experiences of citizens in three different small towns in the north and in the south of the country, this paper argues that contemporaries experienced the period between October 1989 and May 1990 as a liminal moment. This was a time of limitless possibility, in which the old structures of the communist era eroded rapidly and visibly, while new ones were not yet established. Based on the work of Victor Turner, the revolutionary period is best understood as a time of intense communal reflection of what has been, and on what ought to be. This approach contradicts the commonly held view of the revolution as a moment of discontinuity, when early hopes of a better society were dashed by the fall of the Wall on 9 November 1989, which allowed East Germans to experience the FRG at first hand and thus desire its consumerist achievements through unification. Rather, this paper argues that the revolution is a window that allows unique access to the identities East Germans had developed over decades. It also helps us better to understand why ultimately unification with the FRG was most compatible with the identities East Germans had developed over decades, even if for forty years citizens had been socialized in very distinctive ways.