Vortrag
Reviving Samaritan Traditions: ASB's Return and Transformation of EMS in Post-1989 East Germany

This talk examines the return of Arbeiter-Samariter-Bund (ASB), a traditional German welfare organization, to East Germany after 1989 and its importance for the postsocialist transformation of emergency medical service (EMS). Until 1933, ASB had been a nationwide organization with its headquarters in Chemnitz, Saxony, in the East of Germany. After being banned entirely under National Socialism, ASB disappeared from its originally strongest base in the East for most of the second half of the 20th century and could only be re-established in the West of Germany. It was not until the peaceful revolutions of 1989 that ASB got the chance to return to the East. This talk will discuss the implications of this “return” during a period of significant postsocialist transformation in emergency medical service. Questions that the talk addresses are: Who organized the return and with what resources? What role did former Samaritans play and what new ones? Can we tell the postsocialist transformation of emergency medical service as a success story, while the process as a whole marked East Germans as “losers” of the German unification? The talk draws on archival material from the ASB archives in Cologne as well as on qualitative interviews with one representative of ASB from the West and one from the East, who both committed to rebuilding ASB in Saxony in the early 1990s. It is not least their individual initiatives that contributed to ASB’s profile as one of the most important providers of ambulance services, first aid training, and disaster relief operations in the whole of Germany today. Therefore, the main hypothesis of the talk is that processes of institutionalization and professionalization in the field of emergency medical service have not occurred automatically in the wake of postsocialist transformations. They were also based on the collaboration of individuals who believed in Samaritan traditions from the 19th and 20th centuries.