Postsocialist Memory in Contemporary German Culture

Postsocialist Memory in Contemporary German Culture
Author: Michel Mallet
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
Total Pages: 264
Release: 2024-08-06
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 3110730871

Scholarship on Eastern Europe after 1989 often focuses narrowly on the socialist past as authoritarian, dictatorial, or totalitarian. This collection, by contrast, illuminates an additional dimension of post-socialist memory: it traces the survival of hopes and dreams born under socialism and the legacy of the unrealized alternative futures embedded within the socialist past. Looking at contemporary German-language literature, film, theater, and art, the volume analyzes reflections on everyday socialist realities as well as narratives of opposition and dissent. The texts discussed here not only revisit the past, but also challenge the present and help us imagine alternative futures. Rather than framing the unrealized futures envisioned in the pre-1989 era as failures, this collection probes post-socialist memory for its future-oriented potential to rethink issues of community, equity and equality, and late-stage capitalism. Foregrounding the complexities of Eastern European legacies also helps us reimagine the relationship between East and West both in Germany and in Europe as a whole.

Edinburgh German Yearbook 15

Edinburgh German Yearbook 15
Author: Jenny Watson
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
Total Pages: 297
Release: 2022-09-20
Genre:
ISBN: 1640141197

Reconsidering the German tendency to define itself vis-à-vis an eastern Other in light of fresh debate regarding the Second World War, this volume and the cultural products it considers expose and question Germany's relationship with its imagined East.

Envisioning Social Justice in Contemporary German Culture

Envisioning Social Justice in Contemporary German Culture
Author: Jill E. Twark
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
Total Pages: 336
Release: 2015
Genre: Art
ISBN: 1571135693

Explores how contemporary German-language literary, dramatic, filmic, musical, and street artists are grappling in their works with social-justice issues that affect Germany and the wider world.

Postsocialism and Cultural Politics

Postsocialism and Cultural Politics
Author: Xudong Zhang
Publisher: Duke University Press
Total Pages: 364
Release: 2008-04-25
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780822342304

Xudong Zhang offers a critical analysis of China's 'long 1990s', the tumultuous years between the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown and China's entry into the World Trade Organisation in 2001.

What Remains

What Remains
Author: Jonathan Bach
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Total Pages: 268
Release: 2017-08-29
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0231544308

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.

Postmigration

Postmigration
Author: Anna Meera Gaonkar
Publisher: transcript Verlag
Total Pages: 349
Release: 2021-09-30
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 3839448409

The concept of »postmigration« has recently gained importance in the context of European societies' obsession with migration and integration along with emerging new forms of exclusion and nationalisms. This book introduces ongoing debates on the developing concept of »postmigration« and how it can be applied to arts and culture. While the concept has mainly gained traction in the cultural scene in Berlin, Germany, the contributions expand the field of study by attending to cultural expressions in literature, theatre, film, and art across various European societies, such as the United Kingdom, France, Finland, Denmark, and Germany. By doing so, the contributions highlight this concept's potential and show how it can offer new perspectives on transformations caused by migration.

Remembering Communism

Remembering Communism
Author: Maria N. Todorova
Publisher: Central European University Press
Total Pages: 640
Release: 2014-10-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 9633860326

Remembering Communism examines the formation and transformation of the memory of communism in the post-communist period. The majority of the articles focus on memory practices in the post-Stalinist era in Bulgaria and Romania, with occasional references to the cases of Poland and the GDR. Based on an interdisciplinary approach, including history, anthropology, cultural studies and sociology, the volume examines the mechanisms and processes that influence, determine and mint the private and public memory of communism in the post-1989 era. The common denominator to all essays is the emphasis on the process of remembering in the present, and the modalities by means of which the present perspective shapes processes of remembering, including practices of commemoration and representation of the past. The volume deals with eight major thematic blocks revisiting specific practices in communism such as popular culture and everyday life, childhood, labor, the secret police, and the perception of “the system”.

Past in the Making

Past in the Making
Author: Michal Kopeček
Publisher: Central European University Press
Total Pages: 274
Release: 2008-01-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 6155211426

Historical revisionism, far from being restricted to small groups of ‘negationists,’ has galvanized debates in the realm of recent history. The studies in this book range from general accounts of the background of recent historical revisionism to focused analyses of particular debates or social-cultural phenomena in individual Central European countries, from Germany to Ukraine and Estonia. Where is the borderline between legitimate re-examination of historical interpretations and attempts to rewrite history in a politically motivated way that downgrades or denies essential historical facts? How do the traditional ‘national historical narratives’ react to the ‘spill-over’ of international and political controversies into their ‘sphere of influence’? Technological progress, along with the overall social and cultural decentralization shatters the old hierarchies of academic historical knowledge under the banner of culture of memory, and breeds an unequalled democratization in historical representation. This book offers a unique approach based on the provocative and instigating intersection of scholarly research, its political appropriations, and social reflection from a representative sample of Central and East European countries.

The Routledge Handbook of German Politics & Culture

The Routledge Handbook of German Politics & Culture
Author: Sarah Colvin
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 514
Release: 2014-11-27
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1317600150

The Routledge Handbook of German Politics and Culture offers a wide-ranging and authoritative account of Germany in the 21st century. It gathers the expertise of internationally leading scholars of German culture, politics, and society to explore and explain historical pathways to contemporary Germany the current ‘Berlin Republic’ society and diversity Germany and Europe Germany and the world. This is an essential resource for students, researchers, and all those looking to understand contemporary German politics and culture.

Remembering and Rethinking the GDR

Remembering and Rethinking the GDR
Author: A. Saunders
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 356
Release: 2012-12-15
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1137292091

Exploring the ways in which the GDR has been remembered since its demise in 1989/90, this volume asks how memory of the former state continues to shape contemporary Germany. Its contributors offer multiple perspectives on the GDR and offer new insights into the complex relationship between past and present.