Acknowledgements / Introduction — Just another Country in Europe? / Part I: Another New Beginning / 1. End of Story: Nachträglichkeit and the German Past / 2. The German Ideology: Identity, Fantasy, Affect / Conclusion: Reconciliation, Reconstruction, Re-unification / Part II: The Past that Outlived Itself / 3. Really-Existing Nostalgia: Transitions, Fetishes and Objects / 4. Disintegration and Ambivalence: Berlin and Leipzig / Conclusion: Desired and Denied / Part III: The Lives of Ossis on Film / 5. The Lives of Others — Imitations of Life / 6. Good Bye Lenin! — Too Soon, Too Late / 7. Material — Something is Left Over / Conclusion / Part IV: Remembering, Commemorating / 8. In the Gallery: Aesthetics and Memory Contests / 9. In the Street: Commemoration and Interpassivity / Conclusion: In the End… / Conclusion — Another New Ending / Bibliography/ Index
Ben Gook is Associate Investigator at the ARC Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions, University of Melbourne
This book, situated at the intersections of psychosocial and
cultural studies, political science and
anthropology, contributes original and important ideas to the
discussion of how psychoanalytic theories might be applied to
questions of remembrance, commemoration and nostalgia and helps to
elucidate how a liberal capitalist nation-state manages crises and
disruptions.
*Silke Arnold-de Simine, Senior Lecturer in Film, Media and
Cultural Studies, Birkbeck, University of London*
Ben Gook shows in his theoretically sophisticated and quietly
passionate study that the complacent tale of successful German
unification not only forgets the erasure of eastern Germans'
experiences and expectations when the wall came down and the future
seemed open but also reproduces the inner-German division it sought
to heal. Divided Subjects, Invisible Borders is an auspicious
debut.
*A. Dirk Moses, Professor of Global and Colonial History, European
University Institute, Florence*
This immensely knowledgeable and elegantly argued study focusses on
the fraught process of making sense of German re-unification. By
psychoanalytically exploring East and West German fantasies and
projections―i.e. the conceptualisation of subjectivity,
memorialisation, and nostalgic or fetishist object investments―Gook
offers provocative and most intriguing new insights into the
affective workings (or impasses) of a post-‘Wende’ society.
*Christiane Weller, Senior Lecturer in German Studies, Monash
University*
An excellent study of the interrelation between the physical,
social and the affective geographies that marked the re-unification
of Germany, this book offers a subtle analysis of the
subjectivities created through that process. Divided Subjects,
Invisible Borders shows how analytically productive – one can even
say necessary – a subtle deployment of social theory is when
dealing with such complex social processes, and highlights the
continuing importance of psychoanalytic theory in making sense of
realities characterised by a deep entanglement of memory, affect,
fantasies, capitalism and geopolitics.
*Ghassan Hage FAHA, Professor of Anthropology and Social Theory,
University of Melbourne*
This book is a timely intervention in the remembrance of recent
German history, or what Ben Gook aptly calls the “enigmatic,
unfinished business” of the Berlin Wall’s breaching and subsequent
German re-unification. As Gook so eloquently demonstrates through
his eminently readable and masterful theorizing of the disavowed
ambivalence of this period, the revolution was a chaotic rupture
that has only belatedly come to signify what it does today. He
argues that it pays to be reminded of the “fundamental and damaging
misrecognition” at the core of these events, to be attentive to
their contradictions and complex histories, especially as we come
to experience the past increasingly through memory, and a new
generation of Germans who has no first-hand experience of the East
German past comes of age.
*Alison Lewis, Professor of German Studies, The University of
Melbourne*
At a moment in which the outlook for the European project seems
bleak and representative democracy is in crisis, [...] Divided
Subjects, Invisible Borders has much to offer specialists
interested in how dissatisfied and disaggregated citizens negotiate
the identities they are forced to share, at least superficially,
with one another.
*German History*
The book maps theories of fantasy and collective identity onto the
post-transition period and the experience of eastern Germans,
adding new dimensions to a burgeoning literature on
post-unification identity in Germany. To this end, Gook
disentangles complicated theoretical scholarship – from Freud to
Zizek – in order to show how the imaginary and the symbolic help to
anchor both collective (national) identities and a sense of (the
individual) self.
*Journal of Contemporary Central and Eastern Europe*
Divided Subjects, Invisible Borders provides a detailed
introduction to the complexity of memory and space in Germany (and
particularly Berlin) following re-unification, and substantially
expands on a number of key and emerging considerations relevant to
scholars interested in recent German history. In particular, the
combination of media, landscape, history, and politics brings new
insight to a field that frequently addresses the problems of
re-unified Germany from a limited disciplinary perspective
*Society & Space*
Gook, an investigator at the ARC Center of Excellence for the
History of Emotions at the University of Melbourne, takes a
thoroughly interdisciplinary approach, examining East German
culture via politics, popular culture, film, and ethnography. . .
.Overall, this book provides a fresh analytical approach to the
persistent puzzle of divided identities.
*Europe Now*
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