Talk
East German Students As Actors Of Transformation 1987-1992

The talk explores ambiguities of students’ engagement during the political changes in East Germany around 1989. The role of students in the peaceful revolution is highly disputed. According to sociologist Wolf Lepenies, ‘students in the GDR were by no means the spearhead of the revolution’. Likewise, social scientist Hans-Hermann Hartwich claimed that ‘absolutely no ideas or initiatives for reformation’ had come from students. By way of contrast, student activists such as Peer Pasternack, Malte Sieber and Ronald Freytag question the ‘myth’ of inactive or indifferent students. These contradictory views are indicative of the paradoxical nature of revolutionary transformation. Revolutions mobilise masses eager to overthrow the social system but many of those who set out for change are part and parcel of the old system. Therefore, changing the system creates conflicts. Tainted with subconscious remnants of the old system, slowed down by the persistence of habits, conventions and beliefs, protagonists of change sooner or later become victims of the revolutionary dynamics.This might explain why revolutionary students founded student councils in many East German universities in November 1989 but opposed the policy of 'Abwicklung' (winding-up) in 1991. I will be discussing the process of student mobilisation, self-organisation and protest with focus on the ‘Martin-Luther-Universität’ Halle-Wittenberg.

Udo Grashoff received his PhD with a book on Suicide in the GDR (2006) and has been teaching at the University of Leipzig since 2008. From 2014 to 2020, he was a DAAD lecturer at University College London. Grashoff's research focuses on everyday and social history of the GDR and the "Third Reich". One of his recent books deals with the biggest youth prison of the GDR: Jugendhaus Halle (2023). In 2011, he published a study Schwarzwohnen (informal occupation of flats) in the GDR and continued to work on squatting with the edited volume Comparative Approaches To Informal Housing Around The World (2020). In 2021, he published a book Danger from within. Betrayal in the Communist Resistance against the Nazi Regime. He is currently continuing to work on this topic in a DFG project affiliated with the Hannah Arendt Institute.

The talk is part of the HAIT Lecture Series Lost (in) Transformation: Answers from the Recent Past to Challenges of Today in the winter semester and the Dresden-Prague Talks. Matěj Spurný will be chair of the lecture. Petra Schindler-Wisten and Mikuláš Pešta will be commentators.

The Lecture Series takes place in Prague in the library (Vlašská 9) and hybrid via Zoom.

If you would like to attend, please register by the Monday before the event at: hait@tu-dresden.de, stating your full name. The registration link will be sent to you separately a few days before the start of the event.

Diese Maßnahme ist mitfinanziert durch Steuermittel auf Grundlage des vom Sächsischen Landtag beschlossenen Haushalts.