Germany Reunified

Daly, Peter M., et al., eds. Germany Reunified: A Five and Fifty-Year Retrospective. New York: Lang, 1997.256 pp. $32.95 paperback. Volume one of the McGill European Studies series the proceedings of a 1995 conference at McGill University. interdisciplinary conference brought together scholars from numerous disciplines and backgrounds to discuss, as the conference organizers put it, solved as well as problems caused by the reunification of the two Germanies. Essays in this volume are divided into sections representing, presumably, the thematic scope of the conference sessions. They are: intellectuals on politics, reunification and the mass media, reunification in literature, the politics of language, political and economic issues, universities and research after unification, and Germany and and her European neighbors. Thus, the volume offers a fairly diverse retrospective which attempts to capture insights on the Wende period itself, the process of unification since 1990, and the historical influences on that process since 1945. Given that 1995 historically very close to 1990, many of the contributions simply provide valuable information to the non-German world about the actual logistics of unification. For example, Andreas Graf's The Dismantling of the East German Media System: Content and Consequences gives first-hand information about the process, highlighting the lost chances for reform of the West German system, the increase in bureaucratization, and the inability of the East German participants to significantly influence the process. Contributions by Christoph Schneider (Research in the New Bundeslander) and Gert-Rudiger Wemarshaus (East German Science: From Planning to Freedom and Competition) detail the process of change within research academies. Both champion the perspective of a nachholende Revolution (Wegmarshaus) in which the East is modernized according to the model of the West which has thus far been successful. It precisely in the contrasting positions among the essays-whether the essayist champions or denounces unification as assimilation by the East to the West-that the volume becomes historically interesting. Graf's personal experiences, for example, become all the more dramatic following the essay by Hans Bohrmann (The Amalgamation of East German and West German Media: 1989-1995) in which a brief history of journalism and other media in East and West presented from a cold, objective distance

European history and politics · German History and Society · History