Political magazine samizdat in the GDR
In 2001, work began on the attempt to compile a comprehensive internal edition of the political samizdat of the GDR, which had been in circulation as periodicals or created as such until 1989. In this context, the term "samizdat" serves as a synonym for the term "self-published" or something "self-published", the origin of which lies in the Russian word "Самиздат". This refers to the dissemination of ideas that did not conform to the system through unauthorized channels within the USSR, and later also in its satellite states. In cooperation with the Umweltbibliothek Großhennersdorf e.V., the Robert-Havermann-Gesellschaft e.V. Berlin and the MitteleuropaZentrum für Staats-, Wirtschafts- und Kulturwissenschaften der TU Dresden, an initial inventory was made possible thanks to funding from the Bundesstiftung zur Aufarbeitung der SED-Diktatur.
After an application for the realization of the project was submitted to and approved by the German Research Foundation in 2003, numerous other partners were acquired in addition to the already existing cooperation community. These include the Archiv Bürgerbewegung Leipzig e.V., the Martin-Luther-King-Zentrum für Gewaltfreiheit und Zivilcourage e.V. - Archiv der Bürgerbewegung Südwestsachsens (Werdau), the Thüringer Archiv für Zeitgeschichte "Mathias Domaschk" (Jena) and the Zeitgeschichte(n) e.V. Halle.
The intention behind this scientifically oriented merger was to try to protect the outstanding source material of the recent past, which is represented by the Samizdat, from decay. The collected periodicals are inevitably exposed to decay due to the poor quality of the production at the time and the material used. The extremely woody paper is therefore in an extremely poor condition: the structures are disintegrating and the typescripts are fading.
Due to this situation, such sources are not suitable for use in the usual interlibrary loan system of libraries or archives - a long-term supply of literature for this area therefore appears to be endangered in its substance.
For this reason, the DFG project "Politischer Zeitschriften-Samisdat der DDR" ("GDR Political Journal Samizdat") aimed to achieve long-term archival preservation and virtual centralization of the sources. The digitization of the holdings of the GDR samizdat, which are distributed among independent archives, would thus contribute to the achievement of a new level of scientific reconstruction and memory politics. This is because they represent the written basis of a second, forbidden public sphere within the German Democratic Republic.
The other state documents that have been preserved in comparison have so far only given a distorted picture of the citizens' movement that actually took place. The internal edition thus provides a new and truthful perspective on the surveillance mechanisms, the persecution and the influencing of thought by the all-powerful state apparatus.
The first results of the project were presented to the public on May 26, 2005 at the Rotes Rathaus in Berlin. The program included a keynote speech by the Berlin writer György Dalos, the presentation of the preliminary results of the project and a subsequent reception. Furthermore, it was possible to visit the archives of the Robert Havemann Society during a guided tour by prior arrangement.
Under the title "The Globalization of Memory - The Internet as a Virtual Archive", a colloquium was held on the following 27 May, once again on the premises of the Berlin City Hall. In addition to providing insights into the 14,000 digitized pages of the GDR Samizdat, which are to be made available to the general public as a database from 2006, the aim of the conference was also to present and discuss other possibilities for dealing with virtual archives. The aim was to direct the specialist audience's attention beyond the boundaries of the initial project to the opportunities that could arise from the future use of new media for the politics of remembrance.
Based on the lectures given at the colloquium on May 27, 2005, the conference proceedings "Samizdat in Central Europe. Process - Archive - Memory" was published in 2007 as the first volume in the series "Mitteleuropa aktuell" by Thelem Verlag Dresden.