Contested Spaces, Contested Memories

Anotace: When it was decided in the late summer of 1990 that the Soviet troops would withdraw completely from the recently unified Federal Republic of Germany by the end of 1994, the modalities and logistical details of the withdrawal of people and material soon developed into a heated political issue. The ‘Russians’ and the spaces they had occupied since the end of the Second World War quickly became important topics in the newly unified German society, and their impact in this highly dynamic and confusing time cannot be underestimated. In particular, the German mass media played an immensely important role in the public and symbolic imagination of these perpetual ‘strangers’ and their spaces, which were portrayed as requiring an urgent transformation through various processes for them to become ‘German’ again. The article describes the contested public debates about German self-understanding in the 1990s, explains the background leading to this situation, and discusses the immediate and long-term consequences of attributions and categorizations of the ‘Russian’ past.