18th September 2024
Live online
Listen to the live online review of Stephen Brockmann's new Book, The Freest Country in the World (Camden House 2023).
The Freest Country in the World: East Germany’s Final Year in Culture and MemorySeptember 18, 2024, 10-11 am (Mountain Time Zone), via ZoomPlease join us for a discussion of Stephen Brockmann’s book The Freest Country in the World: East Germany’s Final Year in Culture and Memory (Camden House, 2023) for the second Seminar Book Forum.
At this event, author Stephen Brockmann (Carnegie Mellon University) will discuss his book with Jane Freeland (Queen Mary University of London), Sonja E. Klocke (University of Wisconsin-Madison), and Karen Leeder (University of Oxford).
About the book: Building on a growing body of scholarship that questions the one-sided image of the GDR as a surveillance state that left its citizens without all agency, Stephen Brockmann argues that at least in its final year, the East German state afforded its residents with significant freedoms. Moreover, he reconstructs the process by which the memory of the free GDR was replaced by narratives that focus not on freedom but national reunification as the most important achievement of the late 1980s. Drawing on film, literature, and punk music, among other sources, The Freest Country in the World seeks a broad documentary basis for its argument.
About the event series: The Seminar Book Forum curates discussions of new scholarly books that are of wide interest to the international German studies community. Each Forum consists of three critical statements on a given new book, followed by a response by the book’s author(s) or editor(s). Revised versions of the contributions to the online event are published in Seminar: A Journal of Germanic Studies. The Seminar Book Forum is moderated and edited by the Seminar book review editor, Martin Wagner (University of Calgary).
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