"East Germany Lives!”: An Encounter with Rural Graffiti

Abstract

This essay undertakes a provisional reading of spray-painted writing on a dilapidated rural bus shelter that I encountered while investigating cultural practices that evoke and invoke the East German past in contemporary Germany. The graffiti, which read “DDR lebt!” (“East Germany lives!”), appeared in large red letters and was accompanied by the shape of a heart. I propose interpretive possibilities for the themes to which the graffiti allude, acknowledging that I construct a translation that others may not share. The bus shelter with its adornment serves as entry point into interrogating how East Germany is remembered and historicized today. Drawing on Slavoj Žižek (2002) and Svetlana Boym (2001), I point to the limitations of applying the construct of nostalgia to practices that appear to appraise positively Germany’s socialist past. Alaida Assman’s (1996) use of the trace, Kevin Hetherington’s (2010) theorizing on the ruin, and Walter Benjamin’s dialectical image emerge as alternative possibilities for interrogating how individuals intervene in unconventional, unpredictable, and contradictory ways as they connect what has been to the present.