Contested spaces, contested memories : images of post-soviet military sases in reunified Germany

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 during this highly dynamic and confusing period 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. In some parts of the media, these spaces were portrayed as requiring an urgent transformation so that they could become ‘German’ again. Via the social images of the post-Soviet military bases, this article discusses the immediate and longterm consequences of attributions and categorizations of the ‘Russian’ past and argues that those contested images also allow insights into the functioning of society’s self-understanding discourses in reunified Germany.