25 years of German unity

The Lübeck University of Applied Sciences learning platform mooin.oncampus.de is currently offering an online course on the topic of "25 Years of German Unity". Five renowned scientists, including the health scientist Prof. Dr. Yve Stöbel-Richter from our university, are investigating the questions: Why do TV and newspapers always show the same images from 1989/90? Why are we interested in the past at all? Are we suffering from the frustration of unity or are we happy?
Prof. Stöbel-Richter will deal intensively with the question of happiness in her contribution.

The course is open to all interested parties: from students and teachers to senior citizens. Participants in the online course can exchange ideas with each other and with the five lecturers via discussion forums and web talks. The free course ends in December 2015 with an offline event in Berlin

You can register for this free course at the following link:

mooin.oncampus.de/mod/page/view.php

Publication "Faces of the East German Transformation"

"Faces of the East German Transformation" is the title of a book published by psychologists from Leipzig, Görlitz and Dresden to mark the 25th anniversary of German reunification on October 3, 2015. In it, 15 participants in the Saxon Longitudinal Study, which was launched in 1987, talk in a very personal way about how they, as former GDR citizens, have now arrived in a reunified Germany.

"In addition to current views, we are also publishing opinions and statements from past decades of the study's history," says psychologist Prof. Dr. Elmar Brähler, Professor Emeritus at Leipzig University.

 

He edited the book together with Prof. Dr. Yve Stöbel-Richter and Dr. Markus Zenger from Leipzig University and Prof. Dr. Hendrik Berth from Dresden University Hospital. The book is the fifth publication in the history of the longitudinal study, in which a total of 328 East Germans have been empirically followed on their journey from East German to German citizen over the past 28 years.

"We are breaking new ground because this time the focus is not on the scientific data, but on the faces and personal views of the participants. In the fall of 2014, we encouraged all study participants to take part in this book project," reports Brähler.

 

As part of the longitudinal study, the same people who have been taking part in the study since 1987 have been interviewed year after year. The 15 main participants in this volume who agreed to take part had already made themselves available for media inquiries in the past. They are each briefly introduced in the book. This is followed by statements from earlier waves of the study and, finally, a current text that was deliberately left unedited by the editors and written especially for this book project. In addition, the protagonists provided an old photo of themselves from the 1980s and 1990s as well as a current photo for reproduction.

"This means that the 'faces of the East German transformation' actually have faces," says sociologist Yve Stöbel-Richter.

 

Contact:

Faculty of Managerial and Cultural Studies