In the political and cultural discourses of the post-Wende period Berlin was widely seen as the symbolic force of the new united Germany. Between 1989 and 1999 much of East Berlin's urban fabric was radically altered to confirm this image. Memories of the GDR and of National Socialism were erased from the recently unified city - hence the renaming of prominent public sites, of street names and buildings and the demolition of others, mostly in East Berlin. This thesis analyses in six narrative texts a link between the unification and the erasure of Berlin's divided pasts. Both Thomas Hettche's Nox and Thomas Brussig's Helden wie wir focus on the night of November 9 1989 in Berlin and proffer conflicting readings of the event as well as its importance. In Gunter Grass's Ein weites Feld Berlin is represented as a site informed by an omnipresent past covering the last 150 years of German history. For the protagonist of Cees Nooteboom's Allerseelen, Berlin is understood as an archaeological site that invites the critical purchase of a modern, non-German flaneur to uncover the historic. For the paranoid protagonist of Friedrich Christian Delius's Die Flatterzunge, Berlin is experienced as a suffocating and an inescapably constant reminder of an assumed inherited National Socialist guilt. Whereas Tanja Duckers's novel, Spielzone, illustrates a potential liberation from the historic thematised in the previous texts by portraying Berlin as an uninscribed blank urban space inhabited by a historically carefree younger generation. The six texts studied in this thesis constantly debate the function of Berlin as a site of remembering and forgetting.

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This IS is an original study analysing the staging of the German national holiday - the Day of German Unity - commemorating the accession of the German Democratic Republic to the Federal Republic of Germany on 3rd October 1990. By examining the mise-en-scene and rhetoric of the unity commemorations, it highlights the way in which political actors attempted to redefme ideas about united Germany's past, present and future from 1990 to 2005. Adopting the innovative approach ot the cultural history ot poUtics - which understands representations such as national holidays as key mechanisms that not only reflect but also have the potential to influence agendas and discourses - the thesis is based on extensive research of German, French and British newspaper articles, televised reporting, speeches, organisational documents, Bundestag debates and structured interviews with Day of Unity organisers.

To what extent was German unification (1989-90) a turning point (Wende) for the Sorbian national minority? Although a majority of scholars and commentators understand the period as one of ‘revolution’, there are grounds to query how radical or widespread were the changes which the collapse of communism promised to bring. In the case of the Sorbs – a national minority in Germany which was persecuted under the National Socialist regime, which became a protected minority under the German Democratic Republic, and which remains a protected minority under the Federal Republic of Germany – many difficulties persist in the relationship between the Sorbs, the German government, and wider German society, as well as amongst the Sorbs themselves. There have been extensive policy, legal, and constitutional changes since unification, but these have often led to similar outcomes as would have been expected under the GDR. The economy is one of the biggest challenges in the post-unification era, as the government and broader society seek to balance the legally recognised rights of national minorities with the economic interests of the state and society at large. This conflict is most evident in the continuation of brown coal mining in the Sorbian area of settlement, as well as in the privatisation of the GDR’s agricultural collectives after unification. Sorbian cultural institutions and organisations have remained relatively unreformed, which means that traditionalists have retained the upper hand in successive institutional debates. The case study of Horno, a village in south Brandenburg, illustrates these issues well, as it was destroyed in 2004 to make way for brown coal mining, and was the first village after unification to be relocated in this manner. These factors lead to the conclusion that German unification was not quite the turning point that it is commonly believed to be, as in many areas of Sorbian life, the continuities seem to outweigh the changes.

This thesis examines how the German print news media negotiate notions of Germanness by narrating the acts of violent crime committed by the right-wing extremist group National Socialist Underground (NSU) between 2000 and 2011. Combining Paul Ricœur’s textual hermeneutics with insights from narrative criminology as well as violence and narrative media studies, I approach the NSU as a narrative puzzle. I thereby investigate how the media narrate a murder series of nine men with a migration background, a nail bomb attack in a Turkish-dominated street and an (attempted) murder of two police officers. I compare the narratives constructed both before and after the identification of the perpetrators in November 2011. Through an extensive narrative analysis of news media discourse, I examine how notions of Germanness are negotiated through the construction of relationships between perpetrators, victims, society and the state. The key argument is that the NSU has not affected dominant perceptions of Germanness, but reinforced existing ones through the creation of a hierarchy of “‘Others’ within”: immigrants, East Germans, and (right-wing) extremists. The findings show that the interpretation of acts of violent crime, especially over extended periods of time, is rooted in everyday practices of story-telling and identity construction.

La mémoire de la fuite et expulsion de plus de douze millions d’Allemands entre 1945 et 1950 connaît, depuis l’unification allemande, une nouvelle actualité : documentaires dans les médias depuis 2001, expositions nationales en 2005-2006 et surtout des débats qui semblent ne pas vouloir finir. Si ces débats sont souvent interprétés comme le signe du passage de cette mémoire du domaine communicatif au domaine culturel (Assmann), c’est-à-dire comme le signe de "négociations" attendues dès lors qu’il s’agit de la pérennisation et de l’institutionnalisation d’une mémoire de groupe au sein de la mémoire collective nationale, cette étude a précisément pour objectif d’interroger le fonctionnement de ce passage. Il s’agit de mettre à jour le (dis)cours, soit l’histoire, les formes discursives, les acteurs et les enjeux, politiques et identitaires, de cette recomposition mémorielle entre 1989 et 2005. Après une présentation du complexe historique et mémoriel de la fuite et expulsion avant 1989, l’étude discursive qualitative explore, en deux volets, les récits de mémoire privés dans les familles d’expulsés et le débat public dans la presse supra-régionale allemande entre 1989 et 2005. Elle met en évidence le rôle des médias et l’importance du critère générationnel dans les sphères privée comme publique, mais aussi la complexité des interactions mémorielles entre ces deux sphères avant d’élaborer un schéma de l’évolution du lieu de mémoire "fuite et expulsion" dans les quinze premières années suivant l’unification allemande. / Since the German reunification in 1990, the collective memory of the flight and expulsion of more than twelve millions Germans between 1945 and 1950 has become very topical again : several documentary films since 2001, two big exhibitions in 2005-2006 and above all long and controversial discussions have been largely commented in the press over the past twenty years. These debates are often interpreted as the sign of the evolution of this collective memory from a communicative to a cultural memory (Assmann), i.e. as a sign of the expected "negotiations" on its institutionalisation — not only in the group memory of the expelled people, but also in the German national memory. The aim of this research is thus to analyse precisely this evolution, i.e. the (dis)course of this difficult memory between 1989 and 2005, its history, forms and actors by paying attention to the implication of this memory discourse for German politics in Europe and for German national identity. After a presentation of the history and remembrance complex that was "flight and expulsion" before 1989, the study (a discourse analysis) explores, in two steps, the private memory stories in the families of German expellees and the public debate in the German national press between 1989 and 2005. The study points out the role of the media and the importance of the generational change both in the private and the public sphere, as well as the complicated interactions between the two levels. It then elaborates a scheme of how the memory of "flight and expulsion" evolved in the first fifteen years after the reunification.

La réunification ne transforma pas uniquement l’Allemagne sur le plan intérieur, mais eut également d’importantes répercussions sur sa place en Europe et dans le monde. Le nouveau contexte général ainsi que le changement générationnel au sein de la classe politique dans les années qui suivirent, entraînèrent aussi une évolution de l’autoreprésentation de la République fédérale. Tout cela ne resta pas sans conséquences sur sa perception à l’étranger. L’objectif de la présente thèse est d’analyser l’autoreprésentation de la jeune « République de Berlin » et sa réception en France de 1990 à nos jours. La question centrale est de savoir quelle image l’Etat allemand cherche à donner de lui-même et quelle image de l’Allemagne domine en France. Il s’agira de mettre en évidence les évolutions concrètes que l’on peut observer en la matière depuis la réunification, les facteurs permettant de les expliquer ainsi que de déterminer dans quelle mesure il existe une corrélation entre l’autoreprésentation de l’Allemagne et sa réception. / Reunification not only changed Germany domestically, but also had an important impact on its position in Europe and in the world. The new general framework as well as the generational change in politics in the following years also led to a change in the self-representation of the Federal Republic. All this did not remain without consequences on the perception of the country abroad. The aim of this thesis is to analyse the self-representation of the young “Berlin Republic” and its reception in France from 1990 to the present. The key question is which public image does the German state promote of itself and which image of Germany prevails in France. It will be highlighted how this has changed concretely since reunification, by which factors this development can be explained, and to what extent a correlation exists between Germany’s self-representation and its reception.