A virtual event with Molly Andrews, Institute of Advanced Studies, University College London
This presentation will discuss what it means to spend nearly half of one’s life in conversation with the same project participants. There is much in modern academic life which pushes us towards high productivity in constricted periods of time. But might there be certain kinds of knowledge which only become accessible over years, or maybe even decades? In 1992, I interviewed 40 East Germans, most of whom were activists in the peaceful revolution of 1989. The project, which was not initially intended to be longitudinal, has continued for 28 years, with intermittent interviews with a subset of the original participants. Since then, the Berlin Wall has gone from being one of the greatest disappearing acts of the contemporary era’ (Bach 2016) - neglected as a site of commemoration for the first 16 years after it was opened - to acquiring its current status as a ‘touchstone of global memory’(Harrison 2019). But for East German dissidents, the opening of the wall spelled the end, not the beginning of the promise of change in autumn ’89. The activists in my project have become increasingly marginalized from the dominant political narrative; the individualistic portrayal of the citizen’s movement – with heroic but irrelevant dissidents – is an effective erasure of their revolutionary message. This talk will reflect on my experience of spending nearly three decades on the same project, and discuss how this longterm perspective has impacted my scholarship on biography and history.
Join the virtual Zoom event using this meeting link.
For more information about this event, please contact Mary Gibaldi (.4).
