Ritual and Irony: Observations about the discourse of political change in two Germanies
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Abstract
This essay discusses the communicative background of the political changes in the German Democratic Republic leading up to its first free elections and unification with the Federal Republic of Germany on October 3rd, 1990. I argue that the widening dissonance between the ritualized official political discourse and the citizens’ experience of everyday reality precipitated the dissolution of the socialist experiment in the GDR, particularly by means of the ironization of that discourse. The essay concludes with some observations about the search for a new form of meaningful public discourse necessitated by these events.