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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 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 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.
List of contents
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. "The Taste Remains"
2. Collecting Communism
3. Unbuilding
4. The Wall After the Wall
Epilogue: Exit Ghost
Notes
Bibliography
Index
About the author
Jonathan Bach is professor of global studies at the New School. He is author of Between Sovereignty and Integration: German Foreign Policy and National Identity After 1989 (1999) and coeditor of Learning from Shenzhen: China’s Post-Mao Experiment from Special Zone to Model City (2017).
Summary
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.
Additional text
Insightful, original, beautifully written, and richly illustrated with documentary photographs...The book will be of interest for memory-studies scholars, as well as social scientists taking the role of material culture in social processes seriously.
