What Remains: Everyday Encounters with the Socialist Past in Germany
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | 4.24 (705 Votes) |
| Asin | : | 0231182708 |
| Format Type | : | paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 272 Pages |
| Publish Date | : | 2016-04-20 |
| Language | : | English |
DESCRIPTION:
(Serguei Oushakine, Princeton University)Jonathan Bach weaves his way elegantly and insightfully through Berlin’s postunification landscape, highlighting the absences, unsettlements, and inheritances from the past. (Andreas Huyssen, Columbia University) . Bach creates an intricate but highly accessible story about the past that is not quite gone. 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! (Katherine Verdery, the Graduate Center of the City University of New York)What Remains is a perceptive andperhaps more cruciallya very sympathetic account of multiple ways through which ordinary people try to take hold of their po
He is the author of Between Sovereignty and Integration: German Foreign Policy and National Identity After 1989 (1999). Jonathan Bach is associate professor and chair of global studies at the New School.
Moving from the local, the intimate, and the small to the national, the impersonal, and the large, this book's interpenetrating chapters show the unexpected social and political force of the ordinary in the production of memory. Bach juxtaposes four sites where the stakes of the everyday appear: products commodified as nostalgia, amateur museums dedicated to collecting everyday life under socialism, the "people's palace" that captured the national imagination through its destruction, and the feared and fetishized Berlin Wall. What Remains offers a unique vantage point on the workings of the everyday in situations of radical discontinuity, contributing to new understandings of postsocialism and the intricate intersection of material remains and memory.. What happens when an entire modern state's material culture becomes abruptly obsolete? How do ordinary people encounter what remains? In this ethnography, Jonathan Bach examines the afterlife of East Germany following the fall of the Berlin Wall, as things and places from that vanished socialist past continue to circulate and shape the politics of memory.What Remains traces the unsettling effects of t