All of Those Yesterdays: News media and the fall of the Berlin Wall in Russian and German cultural memory
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Abstract
From a twenty-year distance, the fall of the Berlin Wall still remains and continues to reinforce its place in history as not only a pivotal event, but also, owing to the circumstances under which it took place, a unique event in the space of both memory and news media. The relationship between these two entities is a unique one, specifically in regards to the ability of news media to not only influence, but to prescribe on a massive scale and consequently exert considerable control over the content of memory, specifically the entity known as textual media memory. By focusing on the fall of the Berlin Wall as a common event, this investigation tracks the evolution of German and Russian textual media memory over a twenty year period as it appears in the news magazines “Der Spiegel” and “Ogonek,” with the purpose of determining the extent and nature of the effect news media has on memory in the form of textual media memory.