What Remains: Everyday Encounters with the Socialist Past in Germany

Jonathan Bach

Published by Columbia University Press 2017

What Remains

Everyday Encounters with the Socialist Past in Germany

Jonathan Bach

https://doi.org/10.7312/bach18270

Overview
Contents

About this book

Jonathan Bach examines the afterlife of East Germany following the fall of the Berlin Wall, as things and places from the socialist past continue to circulate and shape the politics of memory. What Remains traces the effects of these artifacts, arguing for a rethinking of the role of the everyday as a site of reckoning with difficult pasts.

Author / Editor information

Jonathan Bach is associate professor and chair of global studies at the New School. He is the author of Between Sovereignty and Integration: German Foreign Policy and National Identity After 1989 (1999).

Reviews

Andreas Huyssen, Columbia University:
What Remains traces a quarter century of present pasts—a minefield of forced dispossessions and reappropriations in the struggles of forging German unification. It offers a vibrant encounter with the residues of Germany’s first socialist state and concludes with a moving tribute to a current generation of Nachgeborenen haunted by the failures and the promises of the past.

Sharon Macdonald, Institut für Europäische Ethnologie, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin:
Jonathan Bach weaves his way elegantly and insightfully through Berlin’s postunification landscape, highlighting the absences, unsettlements, and inheritances from the past. In doing so, he shows not only the potency of what remains but also the creativity with which it is addressed and new futures forged. This is a wonderful, highly readable, yet deeply sophisticated book.

Serguei Oushakine, Princeton University:
What Remains is a perceptive and—perhaps more crucially—a very sympathetic account of multiple ways through which ordinary people try to take hold of their politically controversial past. Bach creates an intricate but highly accessible story about the past that is not quite gone.

Katherine Verdery, the Graduate Center of the City University of New York:
In this wonderful book, Jonathan Bach shows the complexity of East Germans' adjustment to their new reality. Examining preferred consumption items, personal museums of things from the past, demolitions and rebuildings, and memorializations of the Wall, he goes well beyond fashionable invocations of "nostalgia" to explore unification's assaults on personhood and identity, on senses of place and history. A must read!

Topics

Frontmatter Publicly Available Download PDF	i
CONTENTS Publicly Available Download PDF	vii
ILLUSTRATIONS Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	ix
MAPS Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	xi
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	xiii
INTRODUCTION Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	1
1. “THE TASTE REMAINS” Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	13
2. COLLECTING COMMUNISM Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	45
3. UNBUILDING Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	91
4. THE WALL AFTER THE WALL Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	137
EPILOGUE Exit Ghost Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	171
NOTES Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	183
BIBLIOGRAPHY Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	223
INDEX Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	245

Language: English
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Audience: Professional and scholarly;
Pages
- Main content: 272
Illustrations
- Illustrations: 3
- Other: 46 b&w photographs, 3 maps, and 3 illustrations

eBook

Published: September 25, 2017
ISBN: 9780231544306