"Schuhmann paints a multi-layered portrait that deliberately rejects the label "East German woman"." Nordkurier

Is there still such a thing as an "Eastern identity" today, 35 years after reunification? The historian Annette Schuhmann adds a special perspective to the intense debate on this and explores the question of how "different" the women of the GDR are. To this end, she brings together thirteen portraits of East German women and shows how experiences, memories and family narratives shape them and what self-image emerges from their socialization in the GDR.

Annette Schuhmann is a research associate at the Leibniz Center for Contemporary History in Potsdam (ZZF), where she has been managing editor of the magazine zeitgeschichte.online since 2008. She is also a lecturer at the Department of History and Cultural Studies at the FU Berlin. Her articles on the everyday history of the GDR and her own biography appear in ZEIT.