Joint Lecture

Christina Morina

Broken Balance:

A Political–Cultural History of Germany since the 1980s

16 November 2022

(0:46 h)

Joint Lecture

Christina Morina

Broken Balance:
A Political–Cultural History of Germany since the 1980s

GHIL Joint Lecture, In co-operation with the Modern History Research Seminar, University of Oxford, given 9 March 2022

The political culture of the ‘Berlin Republic’ has its roots as much in the era of German division as in the transformative years around 1989. Yet it is much more than a story of the convergence of triumphant (West German) democracy and failed (East German) dictatorship. Taking as its point of the departure the increasingly polarized political climate in Germany in recent years and the strong support for right-wing populism, particularly in the East, the project explores the ways in which ordinary citizens in East and West understood themselves as citizens, ‘their’ state, and the meaning and purpose of (democratic) politics. This integrated political–cultural history ‘from below’, crossing the watershed of 1989, illustrates that dramatically divergent conceptions of citizenship and democracy account for many of the enduring differences between the democratic cultures and practices in East and West.

Christina Morina is Professor of Contemporary History at the University of Bielefeld. Her research focuses on major themes in nineteenth and twentieth-century German and European history, especially Nazi Germany and the Holocaust, political and memory cultures in Germany since 1945, and the history of political ideas, particularly socialism, Marxism, and communism.