What Remains?: The Dialectical Identities of Eastern Germans

ISBN-13: 9783031188879 / Angielski / Twarda / 2023 / 532 str.

Joyce Marie Mushaben

Opis

This book tells the story of the German Democratic Republic from “the inside out,” using the lens of generational change to deconstruct an intriguing array of social identities that had little to do with the “official GDR” version authoritarian rulers regularly sought to impose on their citizens. The author compares the “identities” of five societal subgroups (GDR writers and intellectuals; pastors and dissidents; women; youth; and working-class men), exploring the policies defining their lives and status before/during/after the 1989 Wende, as well as the diverging “exit, voice and loyalty” dilemmas encountered by each. The “dialectical” components treated in this work center on the extent to which eastern identities were lost, found and reconfigured across three generations, from 1949 to 1989, from 1990 to 2005, then up to 2020. It explores how the existence of a separate East German state and the socialization processes imposed on each subculture has not only complicated the search for national unity since 1990 but also -- perhaps more controversially—invoked new challenges directly related to ongoing East-West structural disparities since unification and the treatment of eastern Germans by often more privileged western Germans.

Spis treści

Part I. DIMENSIONS OF THE DIALECTICAL IDENTITY.- Chapter One    Exit, Voice and Loyalty:  The Theoretical Parameters: Introduction.- 2. Selection by Consequences: What it meant to be GDR-German.-  II.   THE DECONSTRUCTION OF GDR-IDENITY.- Chapter Three   Now out of Never: Exit, Voice and the Revolutionary Bandwagon.- Chapter Four   Real-existing Socialism: Daily Life, Consumer Culture and “Vitamin B”.- III.   RECONSTRUCTING EAST-GERMAN IDENTITY: SuBcultures.- Chapter Five Heimatgefühl and the Reconfiguration of Civil Society.- Chapter Six  Conscience of the Nation: Writers, Artisans and the Fate of Intellectuals.- Chapter Seven  From Losers to Winners, and Back: The Stasi, Pastors and Dissidents.- Chapter Eight  East German Women: From State Paternalism to Private Patriarchy.- Chapter Nine   The Anti-Political Identities of "Unified" Youth.- Chapter Ten   “No Country for Old Men”: The Rise of the AfD.- Chapter 11   The Dialectical Identities of Germans United.- Epilogue: The Post-Merkel Era.- Appendix A:  Interview Questionnaire

O autorze

Joyce Marie Mushaben is Curators' Distinguished Research Professor of Comparative Politics & Gender Studies (Emerita) at the University of Missouri-St. Louis, USA, and an Adjunct Professor in the BMW Center for German & European Studies at Georgetown University, USA.

Blurb

This book tells the story of the German Democratic Republic from “the inside out,” using the lens of generational change to deconstruct an intriguing array of social identities that had little to do with the “official GDR” version authoritarian rulers regularly sought to impose on their citizens. The author compares the “identities” of five societal subgroups (GDR writers and intellectuals; pastors and dissidents; women; youth; and working-class men), exploring the policies defining their lives and status before/during/after the 1989 Wende, as well as the diverging “exit, voice and loyalty” dilemmas encountered by each. The “dialectical” components treated in this work center on the extent to which eastern identities were lost, found and reconfigured across three generations, from 1949 to 1989, from 1990 to 2005, then up to 2020. It explores how the existence of a separate East German state and the socialization processes imposed on each subculture has not only complicated the search for national unity since 1990 but also -- perhaps more controversially—invoked new challenges directly related to ongoing East-West structural disparities since unification and the treatment of eastern Germans by often more privileged western Germans.

Joyce Marie Mushaben is Curators' Distinguished Research Professor of Comparative Politics & Gender Studies (Emerita) at the University of Missouri-St. Louis, USA, and an Adjunct Professor in the BMW Center for German & European Studies at Georgetown University, USA.