Marks Occupied Ruptures in Space

Cultural recovery of the landscape within the former inner German border area
1. Auflage 2016
ISBN: 978-3-8288-6565-5
Verlag: Tectum
Format: PDF
Kopierschutz: Adobe DRM (»Systemvoraussetzungen)

E-Book, Englisch, Band 72, 266 Seiten

Reihe: Wissenschaftliche Beiträge aus dem Tectum-Verlag

With the reunification of Germany in 1990, the two sides of the former inner German border area found itself no longer as remote regions on the margins of two separated political and social hemispheres, but in the center of a reunited Europe. With focus on the Schaalsee lake in northern Germany, once divided by the border into two nearly equal parts, Günter Marks adresses how the models of the two opposing socio-political systems find their expression in this specific landscape and how its formerly ruptured spaces coalesce – or remain separate – through the actions of the local people. Günter Marks embeds these questions in the debate of Ecological and Visual Anthropology as well as Sensory Ethnography. With the help of the medium film he approaches different concepts of living of the people who inhabit the region and accompanies their individual and collective processes of life. Thereby, Günter Marks illuminates the state of reunification 25 years after the fall of the Wall.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Marks, Günter

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Weltgeschichte & Geschichte einzelner Länder und Gebietsräume Europäische Geschichte
• Sozialwissenschaften Soziologie | Soziale Arbeit Soziologie Allgemein Empirische Sozialforschung, Statistik

Leseproben

1Introduction

It’s been 25 years since the Berlin Wall came down. This is a good reason to focus once more on the topic of German reunification. This process is still ongoing today; its implications reach beyond the actual historical event that took place on November 9th, 1989 and continue to be actively studied and debated, not only by historians but also by sociologists and political and cultural scientists. Many of the central questions of social and cultural anthropology can be revealingly addressed in this context. By looking at the points of intersection between the two former Germanys as expressions of a coming together of two formally different cultural manifestations of two different political systems, insights can be gained into the actual state of reunification. What Berdahl says with regard to her ethnographic investigation of the inner German border area in the Eichsfeld (Oaksfield), Thuringia,1 in the early 1990s seems to be true today: “What makes the German state and the borderland a site of ethnographic inquiry is the historically and culturally specific nature of the border – once looming and impenetrable, now dismantled and reinvented – where power and difference are intimately articulated, exercised, contested, and potentially transformed” (Berdahl 1999: 20). Berdahl concentrates on the “impact of the inter-German [sic!] border on daily life under socialist rule” (Berdahl 1999: 8, emphasis in original). Thus she focuses on the eastern side of the former border in particular. I want to suggest that it still has an impact today. However, this impact unfolds not only on one but on both sides of the former border.

This is why I have chosen the Schaalsee lake in the north of Germany as the focus of my investigation. Before the fall of the Wall, the lake was divided through the middle into two more or less equal parts. After the fall of the Wall, a biosphere reserve was established on the eastern side and the western part continued as a national nature park, which had been founded in 1960. With the reunification of Germany on October 3rd, 1990 the western lakeside was no longer located on the easternmost outpost of the western hemisphere, but in the center of Europe. The same is true – of course the other way round – for the eastern side of the lake. Thus during the subsequent developments, there were not only political, sociological, cultural and historical questions that demanded a response, but also geographical, biological and environmental questions as well. All disciplines are relevant to this investigation because I want to find out, with the help of audio-visual methods, how the models of the two opposing socio-political systems find expression in the area of the former borderland. The question I seek to answer is how formally ruptured spaces within the landscape coalesce – or remain separate – through the actions of local people.

As a citizen of the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG), I naturally have my own history with the border. My father was born in Berlin, raised in the countryside of the former German Democratic Republic (GDR) and came as an eighteen-year-old to West Berlin in 1959. My mother grew up in western Germany. After meeting in Hamburg in the 1960s, my parents got married and raised their children in a rural area a few kilometers outside of the city. The divided Germany was a frequent topic of conversation that arose in various contexts during family talks. When I was a child (I was born in 1971 as the second of two children) we often made trips to West Berlin by car to meet family members. Later on, when travelling with classmates or friends to West Berlin, we had to pass the border checkpoint at Zarrentin, which was situated on the highway a few kilometers south of the village of Zarrentin, the main village on the Schaalsee lake in the former GDR. I still associate the name of the village of Zarrentin mostly as a synonym for the border checkpoint. And I still often think of the huge constructions of the border and the many border officers in uniform checking the cars with dogs and special devices such as mirrors on wheels that they could slide under the car. Thus in a way, this investigation also contains autoethnographic elements, although I do not emphasize this point very much – either in the film, which depicts the ethnographic basis of the work, or in this written text. Nevertheless, I have to declare that I am a child of the former west of the country.

The written text of this work is meant as an analysis of the filmic presentations from the field. With this in mind, I cite the film in text and present film stills where necessary. The written text is not meant as a substitute for the film – or vice versa. Both are conceived as independent from each other and benefit from the advantages of the different media. But both also relate to the other. The debate about the advantages of audio-visual material for anthropological fieldwork is central to the entire text. In this context, I tend to subscribe to MacDougall’s view that “In the end, visual anthropology may need to define itself not at all in the terms of written anthropology but as an alternative to it, as a quite different way of knowing related phenomena” (MacDougall 1998: 63).

Furthermore, the written text is enriched with impressions and notes from my written record, which did not find a place in the film. There is, for example, Frank Hadulla, Director of the Naturpark Lauenburgische Seen (Lauenburg Lakes National Nature Park) on the western side of the lake, who provided insight into the local community during our discussion in August 2014:

During our research for a tour alongside the former border we realized that both sides are still separated. We challenged the claims that there was significant interaction, especially between members of the communities or among the youth. Is it already so far advanced that we can really say that everything has merged together, as we find it partly in the landscape? In some areas we can see the former border very clearly, as in Mecklenburg and Schleswig-Holstein. In others, the green belt is overgrown with plants, and I think this is just as true for society and culture. We have areas where things are more or less united, but also some areas that are divided, so that one village develops one way and the neighboring village develops in an entirely different way.
(Frank Hadulla, Fredeburg near Ratzeburg, August 2014)

This is an assertion that I want to prove in this work. But it also seems that the qualities within the several stages of reunification cannot be measured in black and white terms, but only in terms of different shades of grey.

In the text, I furthermore claim – something that in the film is only apparent through the images – that the recovery of space in the landscape has only occurred on the eastern side of the former border. Most of the development has taken place in the area of the border strip. Although parts of the eastern side have existed as a declared nature reserve since 1958, the extensive widening of protected areas (and within this the adoption of widespread areas under consideration of the conservation of nature) occurred mostly on the western side. The so-called green belt, which was unofficially established after the fall of the Wall as a nature protection zone along the whole former border, is thus a phenomenon solely of the eastern areas. The merging of people and land face obstacles due to at least four distinct yet interrelated reasons, which I have identified as assumptions for this thesis: First, the state borders of today prevent an overarching development approach in terms for the responsibility for the whole area. Still today people do move mostly within the constraints of the former border; second, there is still a competitive dynamic between the two sides of the lake; third, the speed of socio-political and economic development differs on the two sides, although the gap is diminishing; and fourth, in the eastern sphere one sees the stabilization of values and norms on the basis of the embodied experiences of recent years, which differ from those on the western side of the lake. On the other hand – and this, as the fifth assumption, works in a directly opposite way – the lake is at the center of consideration for both communities. As the main feature of the landscape after the border constructions were removed, the Schaalsee lake is the common basis for people’s perception of the environment in the area of investigation, as it is for their processes of identity formation.

I have to admit that the first four assumptions are foremost true for those who have witnessed the political systems of both the FRG and the GDR, including the former border. About those who are too young to have known both, I make no assertions, because they did not belong to the group I investigated. I did not regard this group as relevant to this investigation because they are usually not involved in the reappropriation of land, and this is simply because a certain age is required in order to fulfill the social and cultural tasks that have an impact on shaping the landscape.

The question is, in light of the above five assumptions: How is the construction of nature formulated on both sides of the lake? I take my understanding of the term nature from Ingold, who refers to nature as emergences of cultural constructions (Ingold 2000: 20). But these are not meant as imaginative perceptions, or “ways of looking at potentialities in life through images of the external world” (Luig and Oppen 1997: 19), since the authors describe the “surrealistic play with artistic representations of the world” (ibid.) as one possibility of processes within and visions of...