Exploring the Transnational in Teaching on the GDR in UK Higher Education

In the 2019 call for papers for the sixth edition of the postgraduate conference series The GDR Today, the organisers note that research on the GDR has begun to locate the East German state more rigorously in its transnational context. 1 Indeed, the last decade has seen increasing efforts to explore what Mikkonen and Koivunen (2015) describe as the “entangled histories” between East and West during the period of the Cold War. This follows the “transnational turn” in the study of history, which Iriye (2012: 1–3) dates to the late 1980s/early 1990s when “nation-centrism” gave way to “a more global approach”, which stressed transnational actors and themes. The transnational turn is not confined to the discipline of history: study of “economic, social and political linkages between people, places and institutions crossing nation-state borders and spanning the world” – as Vertovec (2009: 1) defines it – can be seen across the humanities and social sciences. This includes other fields in which the study of the GDR is embedded: notably, memory studies (e.g. De Cesari and Rigney 2014) and German studies (Pence and Zimmerman 2012; Silberman 2016; Braun and Schofield 2020a).