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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 small to the national, the impersonal, and 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.

This article explores two modes of innocence at work in the making of the Humboldt Forum, Germany's biggest cultural project. It examines the legacy of the historical castle's "cabinet of curiosities" and the elevation of the Humboldt brothers, especially Alexander von Humboldt, to patron saints. Through these cases, the article identifies an exculpatory mode of innocence focused on the past and an anticipatory mode focused on the future. These modes, it argues, exemplify a tension between the imagination of history as a timeless realm that eschews redemption and as fungible materials that can be recombined to start anew and redeem the past.

This article examines how colonial reckoning is belatedly becoming part of the German memory landscape thirty years after reunification. It argues that colonial-era questions are acquiring the status of a new phase of coming-to-terms with the past in Germany alongside—and sometimes in tension with—the memory of the National Socialist and East German pasts. This raises new and difficult questions about what it means for the state and citizens to act responsibly in the face of historical wrongs and their lasting consequences. Given deep disagreements over what responsibility for the past means in practice, these questions also raise the stakes for the future of Germany's global reputation as a normative model for democratic confrontations with difficult pasts. It provides an overview of the circumstances after reunification in which colonial memory issues came to the fore, and analyzes a 2019 Bundestag debate on colonial heritage as an example of how the main contours of colonial memory are being configured within the context of contemporary politics.

Across former East Germany today there are more than two dozen private museums devoted to representing everyday life under socialism. Some are haphazard collections in cramped spaces, others marketable mainstays of their local tourist economy. Historians have criticized them as at best amateurish and, at worst, a trivialization of the GDR's repressive practices. Yet, this article argues how, as a social phenomenon, these museums form an important early phase in postunification efforts by public cultural institutions to incorporate the GDR everyday into working through the past. The article examines the museum's modes of representation and shows how the museums lay claim to authenticity through a tactile, interactive, and informal approach. Despite valid criticisms, the article argues that the museums can be seen as helping overcome, rather than reinforce, the binary of totalitarianism and everyday life as antagonistic frameworks for understanding the socialist past.

AbstractThis essay on Shenzhen, China, presents three vignettes addressing the question of home in a city of migrants. The first section explores the ubiquitous narratives of success forming the city's foundational myth. The second follows this myth into the world of a Shenzhen filmmaker and his characters, as they navigate the tension between the idea of home and the urge to start anew, resulting in the suspended possibility of the title. The last section looks at young architects who hope to preserve the city's heterotopic sites of migrants and original villagers through architectural innovations. The cases show how an economy of desire supplements the political economy of this export‐driven city. The city appears as an urban desiring machine that produces itself as an object of desire for the migrants of all classes who flock to its factories, 'urban villages', white‐collar jobs, luxury villas and underground economy. The essay is an encounter with the mythology of success and failure, the intertwining of home as an end and home as the beginning, and with the manipulation of space that allows residents to control their own subjectivity.Résumé Ce travail sur Shenzhen présente trois évocations sur le thème du 'lieu d'origine' (home) dans une ville chinoise de migrants. La première partie revient sur les récits généralisés de réussites qui sont à la base du mythe fondateur de la ville. La deuxième suit ce mythe dans l'univers d'un cinéaste de Shenzhen et de ses personnages soumis aux tensions entre la notion de lieu d'origine et l'envie de recommencement, aboutissant à la 'possibilité en suspens' du titre. La dernière partie porte sur de jeunes architectes dont les innovations espèrent préserver, dans la ville, des sites hétérotopiques de migrants et d'anciens villageois. Les cas étudiés montrent comment une économie du désir s'ajoute à l'économie politique de cette ville orientée à l'exportation. La ville apparaît comme une machine urbaine en désir qui s'autoproduit en objet de désir pour les migrants de toute classe qui affluent vers ses usines, 'villages urbains', emplois de bureau, villas de luxe et son économie souterraine. Ce texte est une rencontre avec la mythologie du succès et de l'échec, avec le lien inextricable entre le lieu d'origine comme fin et comme début, et avec la manipulation de l'espace qui permet aux habitants de maîtriser leur propre subjectivité.

This essay concerns paranoia's apocalyptic implications when harnessed by the state. It argues that current characterizations of paranoia as either resistance to globalization or a lay critique of Enlightenment ideals do not obviate paranoia's destructive dynamics in the service of state power. Paranoia remains a political phenomenon that calls for analysis at the level of the structure of rule. The essay explores one approach to paranoia as a political category through an ideal-typical model drawn from Elias Canetti's classic 1960 text Crowds and Power. It concludes with a discussion on how technology mediates between power and secrecy, forming a key nexus in the exploration of politics and paranoia.