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No example demonstrates the fluidity of the past within the German Democratic Republic more powerfully than the history of the Prussian state. Initially attacked in East German official histories as the historical engine of German militarism and reaction, Prussia underwent a remarkable transformation in official and public memory from around the end of the 1970s. This was the so-called 'Prussia-Renaissance', in which, for the first time, the East German state began to recognise and even celebrate figures from Prussian history who had not served a 'progressive' agenda. But the 'Prussia-Renaissance' was also a political and cultural phenomenon with a wide public resonance. The 'Prussia-Renaissance' may have been a relatively short-lived phenomenon, but it evidently opened a deep vein in the historical memory of the German Democratic Republic that defied reduction to 'high politics' alone. This book asks why. Using the case study of Prussia, Marcus Colla presents a multi-perspective approach to the way that a distinctive 'historical culture' was constructed in the German Democratic Republic. It not only evaluates the roles played by political figures, historians, and cultural elites, but also heritage preservationists, exhibition curators, heimat museums, television producers, novelists and playwrights, and singers – the purveyors of what we might more generally term 'popular culture'. In essence, Colla poses four fundamental questions for our understanding of life, politics and culture in communist East Germany: how was history there made? How was it understood? How was it contested? And how was it used?

Using the case study of Prussia, Marcus Colla presents a multi-perspective approach to the way that a distinctive 'historical culture' was constructed in the German Democratic Republic, evaluating the roles played by political figures, historians, and cultural elites, but also purveyors of popular culture, such as writers and musicians.

AbstractFrom its very conception some thirty years ago, Berlin's Humboldt Forum has been one of contemporary Germany's most controversial cultural initiatives. One aspect of this controversy has been the role of the Prussian past in reunified Germany. Housed in a reconstruction of the Prussian Royal Palace destroyed by the East German communist government in 1950, the visual symbolism of the project spurred a long struggle over the appropriate urban aesthetic for the country's capital city. In the view of many critics, the structure symbolizes the triumph of a particular conservative narrative of national memory that excludes the GDR, downplays National Socialism, and uncritically celebrates the Prussian past. This article traces how public debates about the structure of the Humboldt Forum have served as a vehicle for reflection on Prussian history and its relevance (or irrelevance) for reunified Germany.

Presentism used to be so simple. In the old vernacular it referred to a tendency to view the past from the perspective of the present (or, at its most extreme, maybe even use the past to illuminate the present). Historians disagreed furiously on the intellectual virtues of orienting their views of the past to the needs of the current day. But the content of the term itself was rarely disputed.

In postwar East Germany, dealing with the history of Prussia was problematic. While 'Prussianism' or the 'Spirit of Prussia' was widely perceived as a central cause of Nazism, it also could not be ignored when developing 'progressive' narratives of German history. This article investigates the political, intellectual and symbolic construction of a 'Prussia-myth' in the early postwar years. In particular, it investigates how the 'Prussia-myth' was adapted to changing political conditions, the theoretical contradictions this engendered, and the manner in which historians and cultural figures dealt with these problems when educating the East German population at large.

AbstractThis article considers the fate of Prussian buildings and memorials in East Germany between 1945 and 1961. Analyzing a number of case studies from Berlin and Potsdam, it places the treatment of these structures within the broader contours of history management practices. Although this era was characterized by a strong anti-Prussian sentiment in the GDR's historical discourse, it also witnessed a complex interaction between the SED and its historical inheritance. This interaction often influenced decisions about the fate of Prussian structures in the GDR as much as any animosity toward Prussia as a historical entity did.

Yulia Komska, The Icon Curtain: The Cold War's Quiet Border (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2015).
Reviewed by Jeffrey Luppes, World Language Studies, Indiana University South BendRobert C. Holub, Nietzsche's Jewish Problem: Between Anti-Semitism and Anti-Judaism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016).
Reviewed by Klaus Berghahn, German, University of Wisconsin, MadisonStephen F. Szabo, Germany, Russia, and the Rise of Geo-economics (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2015)
Reviewed by Meredith Heiser-Duron, Political Science, Foothill CollegeJuan Espindola, Transitional Justice after German Reunification: Exposing Unofficial Collaborators (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015).
Reviewed by Sara Jones, Modern Languages, University of BirminghamJost Hermand, Das Liebe Geld! Eigentumsverhältnisse in der deutschen Literatur (Cologne: Böhlau, 2015)
Reviewed by Klaus L. Berghahn, German, University of Wisconsin, MadisonSimon Ward, Urban Memory and Visual Culture in Berlin: Framing the Asynchronous City, 1957-2012 (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2016).
Reviewed by Marcus Colla, History, University of Cambridge

Dolores L. Augustine, Taking on Technocracy: Nuclear Power in Germany, 1945 to the Present (New York: Berghahn Books, 2018)Michael Meng and Adam R. Seipp, Modern Germany in Transatlantic Perspective (New York: Berghahn Books, 2017)Cynthia Miller-Idriss, The Extreme Gone Mainstream: Commercialization and Far Right Youth Culture in Germany (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017)Constantin Goschler, ed. Compensation in Practice: The Foundation 'Remembrance, Responsibility and Future' and the Legacy of Forced Labour during the Third Reich (New York: Berghahn Books, 2017)Albert Earle Gurganus, Kurt Eisner: A Modern Life (Rochester: Camden House, 2018)Claudia Sternberg, Kira Gartzou-Katsouyanni, and Kalypso Nicolaïdis, The Greco-German Affair in the Euro Crisis: Mutual Recognition Lost? (London: Palgrave MacMillan, 2018)

Heinrich Detering, Was heißt hier "wir"? Zur Rhetorik der parlamentarischen Rechten (Dietzingen: Reclam Press, 2019).Clare Copley, Nazi Buildings: Cold War Traces and Governmentality in Post-Unification Berlin (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2020).Tobias Schulze-Cleven and Sidney A. Rothstein, eds., Imbalance: Germany's Political Economy after the Social Democratic Century (Abingdon: Routledge, 2021).Benedikt Schoenborn, Reconciliation Road: Willy Brandt, Ostpolitik and the Quest for European Peace (New York: Berghahn Books, 2020).Tiffany N. Florvil, Mobilizing Black Germany: Afro-German Women and the Making of a Transnational Movement (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2020).Ingo Cornils, Beyond Tomorrow: German Science Fiction and Utopian Thought in the 20th and 21st Centuries (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2020).Christian F. Ostermann, Between Containment and Rollback: The United States and the Cold War in Germany (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2021).