Social remembrance of imprisonment in the GDR: temporality, intercorporeality and generalization

The article deals with different communicative formats and media of memories of imprisonment in the German Democratic Republic (GDR). The reference to physical abuse is what connects these different formats and motivates the sociological question of how bodies shape the social meaning of memory and control the selectivity of memories in communication. In this article, these questions are answered empirically using a variety of historical documents from the Ministry of State Security of the GDR and the memories of contemporary witnesses and described by analysing reconstructive genres. Intercorporeality proves to be a constitutive feature for intersubjectivity and mutual, bodily pre-structured understanding. Against this background, forms of injured bodies become visible as part of a structure of understanding that enables those affected to intervene against the normalising tendencies of situations of arrest. Embodied remembrance of situations of imprisonment thus provides communicative connection possibilities, not only to articulate memories, but also to enable social criticism, collective recognition and political change.