What Remains: Everyday Encounters With The Socialist Past In Germany
by Jonathan Bach /
2017 / English / EPUB
198.8 MB Download
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 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
What Remains traces the unsettling effects of these unmoored
artifacts on the German present, arguing for a rethinking of the
role of the everyday as a site of reckoning with difficult pasts.
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. 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.
traces the unsettling effects of these unmoored
artifacts on the German present, arguing for a rethinking of the
role of the everyday as a site of reckoning with difficult pasts.
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. 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.What Remains
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.
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.