“Remembering East Germany's Peaceful Revolution”

This exhibition is based on a project which Molly Andrews, Professor of Political Psychology in London, began in 1992, when she conducted interviews with forty East Germans. Most of these women and men had been leading critics of the East German government and had played an important role in contributing to the bloodless revolution of 1989. They included artists, actors, religious leaders, scientists, and politicians. She also interviewed official employees and informal informants of the Ministerium für Staatssicherheit as well as academics, writers and politicians who were members of the Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands up until 1989. Twenty years later, she conducted a follow-up study with fifteen of the original forty participants,

Our exhibition shows Vaughan Melzer's 15 photo portraits of the interviewees and is organized around four themes which can be explored in audio files and a video*:

• the intersection of biographical and historical change (“Generations”)
• the role of the past in the present (“Representation of East German  History”)
• the meaning of being from East Germany (“East German Identity”)
• memories of the night the Berlin Wall was opened and subsequent anniversaries of that event (“November 9th”).

The exhibition will be opened on November 12, 2014, 3 pm.

* All materials relating to this project have been archived at the Robert Havemann Gesellschaft, Berlin.

Anyone wishing to learn more about the work of Molly Andrews can contact her: m.andrews [at] uel.ac.uk