What’s Next? Historical Research on the GDR Three Decades after German Unification

Abstract

The once-heated controversies about the history of the East German state and its legacy in the post-unification years have finally come to an end, some historians of the GDR have recently emphasized. Picking up on this cue, this forum enquires how a potential new openness might shape historians’ research agendas in the mid-term future. To make such predictions, we start by reflecting on our own intellectual formation and how we became interested in the histories of the GDR. We then discuss some of the latest developments in the field before sketching out pathways for future research. These observations and predictions are necessarily subjective. We do not aim at a comprehensive overview but want to provide a snapshot of the diversity in the field and its various generational expressions, highlighting new trends.