PhD project
The project forms part of the BMBF-funded research association “The GDR’s media heritage”.
The discussion on digitality and memory is typically anchored in the present, often ‘arbitrarily setting a rather late point in time from which digital media are considered relevant’ (Habbo Knoch). In contrast, this doctoral project demonstrates how digital forms of GDR remembrance began to take shape already in the 1990s and 2000s – and thus before the rise of social media. On a broader level, it examines digitization and post-socialist transformation as an inextricably intertwined ‘double transformation’, exploring their interpendenencies during these two decades. At the center of the project is the early World Wide Web as a new medium, whose functions and modes of use had to be negotiated and learned during the transformative years of the 1990s and 2000s. In particular, private homepages and forums emerge as sites of individual remembrance practices, through which users actively shaped the developing landscape of memory and reconciliation both in the digital realm and beyond.
The project relies on a broad range of sources, with a praticular focus on born-digital materials, especially archived websites from the Internet Archive. In doing so, this doctoral project takes an initial step toward making the holdings of the Internet Archive accessible fore contemporary historical research. At the same time, in engaging analytically with archived websites, it opens up a new type of source that is like to gain increasing importance for the history of the post-1989/90 period.
Supervisor: Frank Bösch
The project was edited by Nils Theinert from 12/2018 to 02/2020.
