Reading selection for German Unity Day

Today marks the 20th anniversary of the reunification of Germany. For this occasion, we offer the following reading selection from Daphne Berdahl's book, On the Social Life of Postsocialism: Memory, Consumption, Germany. In this excerpt, Berdahl discusses how nostalgia for East Germany developed after the reunification.

About the book
Anthropologist Daphne Berdahl was one of the leading scholars of the transition from state socialism to capitalism in central and eastern Europe. From her pathbreaking ethnography of a former East German border village in the aftermath of German reunification, to her insightful analyses of consumption, nostalgia, and citizenship in the early 21st century, Berdahl's writings probe the contradictions, paradoxes, and ambiguities of postsocialism as few observers have done. For more information, visit our website.