On the Social Life of Postsocialism

Daphne Berdahl (1964-2007) was Associate Professor of Anthropology and Global Studies at the University of Minnesota. She is author of Where the World Ended: Re-Unification and Identity in the German Borderland and editor (with Matti Bunzl and Martha Lampland) of Altering States: Ethnographies of Transition in Eastern Europe and the Former Soviet Union. Matti Bunzl is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He is author of Symptoms of Modernity: Jews and Queers in Late-Twentieth-Century Vienna and Anti-Semitism and Islamophobia: Hatreds Old and New in Europe.

Preface by Michael Herzfeld; Acknowledgments; Introduction by Matti Bunzl Part 1. Washington, D.C.; 1. Voices at the Wall: Discourses of Self, History, and National Identity at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Part 2. Kella; 2. Consumer Rites: The Politics of Consumption in Re-Unified Germany; 3. "(N)Ostalgie" for the Present: Memory, Longing, and East German Things; 4. "Go, Trabi, Go!": Reflections on a Car and Its Symbolization over Time; 5. Mixed Devotions: Religion, Friendship, and Fieldwork in Postsocialist East Germany; Part 3. Leipzig; 6. The Spirit of Capitalism and the Boundaries of Citizenship in Post-Wall Germany; 7. Local Hero, National Crook: "Doc" Schneider and the Spectacle of Finance Capital; 8. Expressions of Experience and Experiences of Expression: Museum Re-Presentations of GDR History; 9. Goodbye Lenin, Aufwiedersehen GDR: On the Social Life of Socialism Notes; References; Index