PhD project

In the immediate aftermath of the GDR’s dissolution, a different and decisive “Wende” in media history set in: With the World Wide Web a new period of digitisation began in the 1990s. The PhD project investigates the interactions and interdependencies of this twofold transition in the aftermath of 1989/90. It focuses on the question of how this new online medium and in particular social media determined the development of different forms and narratives of GDR memories. How have different memory agents embraced the internet with their particular media practices? To answer this question requires analysing transformations in an array of “born digitals” – from early websites to online platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. To this end, the PhD project draws on archival material, press sources, websites archived by the Internet Archive, social media and contemporary witnesses.

The project forms part of the BMBF-funded research association “The GDR’s media heritage”. Supervisor: Frank Bösch.

The project was edited by Nils Theinert from 12/2018 to 02/2020.