In this paper we seek to analyse and compare the discursive construction of German and Polish memory in everyday and media discourse, focusing on the communist past of both countries, i.e. the German Democratic Republic (GDR) and reunification on the one hand and the People's Republic of Poland and Poland's democratic transformation on the other. Both countries share a similar past, such as the communist state doctrine, centralism as a political structural principle or the close involvement in the military alliance of the Warsaw Treaty Organisation. Yet, the historical reappraisal of this past has taken place under different auspices. Both countries therefore offer a perfect basis for comparison on whether and how public remembrance influences the people's everyday discourse of this past.
While the GDR had joined the FRG in 1990 and the historical reappraisal took place primarily under the leadership of West German politics and the GDR opposition, Polish memory was determined by a renewal from within. The public GDR memory discourse, which is more or less stable since the beginning of the 1990s, is characterised by its focus on the dictatorial aspects of life in the GDR. In Poland, however, the memory discourse has changed over the decades, shaped by the clash between two political classes and a generational divide.
The question of what the population in both countries thinks about the public memory of the communist past is becoming increasingly relevant because public reappraisal and remembrance politics are coming under increasing pressure. In Germany, the right-wing party AfD is trying to take over the discourse with campaign slogans such as "Complete the turnaround" (alluding to the political turnaround of 1989/90). Meanwhile, within each of the two dominant memory trends in Poland – the liberal-left modernizatory one and the right-wing nationalist one – the communist past has been fully discredited as the "enfant terrible" of national history.
That said, 30 years after the fall of the Wall and the collapse of the Eastern Bloc, there are still people who have personal experiences from that time. How do their memories differ from those that have been socialised in the new political systems? And how can these differences be explained by the different (hegemonic) practices of public memory in the two countries?
Drawing on Foucault's concepts of power, knowledge and discourse, we have conducted 15 focus group discussions with more than 70 participants (everyday memory) and 25 interviews with journalists (public memory) as well as analysed around 200 published articles from mainstream media from both countries, using a qualitative research design.
The results show that the public and everyday discourse of memory differs significantly. In the everyday discourse, the focus is on personal everyday difficulties (the queues and problems with everyday needs), but also on the pleasant aspects of the past (the strong community and social cohesion). In public memory the focus is strongly on dictatorship and experiences of oppression. Differences can be seen above all in the perception of public discourse, which is strongly criticised, especially in Germany.
