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Abstract
This essay explores the historical and cultural transition of 1989 and German reunification through the lens of literary “collective memory” analyzing two contemporary works: Thomas Brussig’s Sonnenallee (1999) and Lutz Seiler’s Sterne 111 (2020). The author contrasts the “failed European constitutional revolution” of those years with the current institutional crisis of the European Union, marked by new wartime and geopolitical fractures. The essay connects these literary visions to symbolic events of “pan-European sociability” in 1989, such as the first Love Parade and the Pan-European Picnic, interpreting them as practices of reappropriation of shared time and space. In conclusion, the author suggests tracing in this libertarian imagination and in the multicultural vocation of places like the current Sonnenallee, the Arab street of Neukölln, the foundations for a welcome of diasporas and for a peaceful encounter between peoples, beyond the logic of war of the newly divided West.