Zone talk

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Zonentalk was a project to research the everyday culture of the GDR . Students from Chemnitz and Berlin had set up an internet forum at Zonentalk.de, which served to collect stories and experiences from everyday life in the GDR. It was thus an early form of Citizen Science that used the Internet to collect data. The website was launched at the end of 1999 and disappeared from the network between 2010 and 2019. The book was published for the forum in 2001.

Originated as a sub-project of a dissertation , Zonentalk quickly developed a life of its own and a meaning that went beyond the dissertation. Among other things, this resulted in a book publication that provides a permanent reference for everyday life in the GDR. The project served as inspiration for other projects by other researchers on GDR everyday culture such as " Denver Clan and New Germany : Media Use in the GDR".

Emergence

The project arose from the observation that many prominent people in the GDR published their biographies in the 1990s and were thus able to present their view of the former state. The historical research dealt mainly with the surveillance state and the resistance movement against it. However, in the opinion of the initiators, there was a lack of a history of most of the citizens, their experiences and their view of things. It was initiated by students from the Technical University of Chemnitz, the Humboldt University in Berlin and the Böhlau Verlag Vienna.

The initiators also wanted to overcome the gap between East and West. The impression of the initiators was that even 10 years after the fall of the Wall, East Germany was an unknown country for many West Germans and that the media depiction was limited to a clichéd garden gnome with barbed wire fence - which in the west did not spread any knowledge about the east and in the east in particular Generated skepticism towards the media. The aim of the project was to paint a more diverse, broader picture of the East as people actually experienced it.

method

The initiators set up a server at the address Zonentalk.de. Here they called on the former citizens of the GDR to present their views on the experiences of that time and on the experiences of the time of reunification in a forum. The approach was deliberately chosen to be open. The initiators wrote of "The main thing is stories. Regardless of whether they are funny or serious, ostal or critical, moralizing or ironic, politically correct or incorrect, everyone can write what they like in ZONENTALK."

The project resulted in a book which, grouped by topic, collects some particularly formative contributions to the discussion.

In the year 2000 the forum reached the impressive number of hits of around 1000 per day at the time. From April to August 2000 there were around 60,000 hits. In 2002 it was still around 300 hits a day.

The website will be shut down in 2019. The web address no longer has anything to do with the original project.

Disputes with the university.

The project was created on my own initiative on computers at Chemnitz University of Technology. After the university found out about the project after about six months, it wanted to have it removed. On the one hand, she accused the initiators of being too open and not scientific enough. On the other hand, they accused them of working towards a book publication and thereby pursuing commercial interests. At the same time, the Chemnitzer Morgenpost raised serious allegations: it described that the forum was less about experiences in everyday life in the East and more about "Stammtisch slogans and dull Ossi and Wessi jokes". According to the initiator Mühlberg, the local press turned directly to the management of the TU with the allegations, whereupon the university gave the students a month to disappear from the TU computers.

Content

By November 2000, 3,500 articles on 300 topics had been collected. The initiators write that a large part of the offer was depictions of everyday life in the GDR. The contributors were 12 to 80 years old and came from the social spectrum of the GDR. Wessi jokes were particularly effective in the public debate, but also often drastic and clichéd descriptions of everyday life after the turnaround. In these descriptions of the new West, too, many of the ex-GDR citizens opposed their view of the GDR as normal and compared the West with it, which also allowed a special view of the Federal Republic. The book publication brings together the topics of childhood, school, introduction to practical life, love and sexuality, consumption, fashion, music, army days and East-West communication. Sub-items are for example "Goths", "Hairstyles", "Working atmosphere yesterday and today."

Press releases pounced on the conflicts in the forum. Der Spiegel wrote of Ossi-haters who want the Wall back and Wessi-haters who exchanged jokes about Wessis. But he also noted the exciting reports that are seldom found "including discussions about the advantages of coated frying pans and reports about the pitfalls of commercially available slingshots at the time"

The assessments also diverged in the following years. In 2002 Die Welt wrote that the forum had "degenerated into an unrestrained archive of abuse." In the same year n-tv wrote that the site with more than 7000 articles "has meanwhile become an archive of contemporary history".

In a meeting in 2007, the social scientist Katja Neller criticized the fact that many of those present in the forum complained that West Germans were dominant in the state as a whole, so that a profitable East-West dialogue through the forum would "hardly be expected".

literature

  • Felix Mühlberg and Annegret Schmidt (eds,): Zonentalk. GDR everyday stories from the Internet . Böhlau 2001. ISBN 3-205-99277-6

Remarks

  1. ^ Michael Meyen: Denver Clan and New Germany: Media Use in the GDR . Ch. Links, 2010, ISBN 978-3-86284-051-9 , pp. 35 .
  2. ↑ a b c d e f g h Felix Mühlbauer and Annegret Schmidt (eds.): Zonentalk. GDR everyday stories from the Internet. Böhlau, 2001, ISBN 3-205-99277-6 , pp. 7-10 .
  3. ↑ a b c d Zone talk: "Ä Dännsche please" . In: Spiegel Online . August 29, 2000 ( spiegel.de [accessed November 23, 2019]).
  4. ↑ a b n-tv NEWS: Comeback of the GDR. Retrieved November 23, 2019 .
  5. ↑ heise online: "Zonentalk" has to change servers. Retrieved November 23, 2019 .
  6. ↑ Michael Pilz: ddr.de my home . October 15, 2002 ( welt.de [accessed November 23, 2019]).
  7. ↑ Katja Neller: GDR nostalgia: dimensions of the orientations of East Germans towards the former GDR, their causes and political connotations . ISBN 978-3-531-90425-2 , pp. 308 .