Time at a Standstill: Loss, Accumulation, and the Past Conditional in an East Berlin Neighborhood

Abstract

This article reconsiders the question of nostalgic consumption in East Germany as embedded not within a national or a regional (post-socialist) politics of time, as much literature has done, but rather within a global post-Fordist reconfiguration of the relation between time, consumption, and politics. Examining an underclass East Berlin neighborhood that has come to epitomize ‘pastness’, I show the salience of material prosperity – or its lack – in shaping the senses of time of its inhabitants. Especially for the younger generation, nostalgic commodities mediate the growing abyss between loss and accumulation, futures and pasts, nostalgic longings and unrealistic aspirations. I argue that the nexus of time, politics, and consumption has been transformed with the fading away of what has been called the future perfect (the political temporality of utopian projects) and its metamorphosis into what I term here the past conditional, the temporality of lost futures, irredeemable opportunities, and vanquished political imaginaries.

Keywords:

• East Germany
• temporality
• nostalgia
• consumption
• post-Fordism

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to the University of Chicago, the Social Science Research Council, the Hannah Holborn Gray Mellon Fellowship, and the Josephine De Kármán Fellowship for their generous support of the research on which this article is based. I would also like to thank Greg Beckett, Alejandra Leal, Noa Vaisman, and participants in the Anthropology of Europe Workshop and in the Social Structures and Processes in the Urban Space Workshop at the University of Chicago for their helpful comments on the previous drafts of this article. Finally, I thank the two anonymous reviewers for their insightful suggestions.

Notes

The term Getto evokes a series of determinate associations, all of which (re)present ethnicized configurations of urban spaces: earlier Jewish ghettos, today's ‘immigrant ghettoes’ in European cities, and the American inner-city ghetto. In our case, it was commonly employed to refer to the neighborhood and referenced commercially mediated images of the American namesake. Young residents used the term to index moral virtues (camaraderie, masculinity, being ‘cool’), while outsiders attached to it a less flattering valence. I follow local usage here not in order to suggest a sociological analogy between the Getto and contemporary forms of ‘advanced marginality’ (Wacquant 2007) elsewhere, but rather to capture how globally circulating representations of the American Inner City Ghetto shape residents' perception of their neighborhood.

The black–white–red colors hark back to the Second and Third Reichs, marking a far-right anti-Republicanism.

No doubt, groups of bored young people are a likely feature of many world regions today. Michael Ralph, for example, has described similar images of young Senegalese who spend their days drinking tea outdoors (Ralph 2008). And yet, as Ralph explains, in Senegal such scenes bespeak the ways in which the state contains youth following the disappearance of jobs. The scene at the Kugel similarly exposes a particular historical moment. When they were young, the parents of the young people that gather there spent their days at the workplace or in vocational training programs that were virtually certain to lead to employment. Their children's boredom, in turn, references a post-Fordist disengagement from processes of production and marginalization with respect to activities of consumption.

Several writers have insisted that the end of the cold war transformed both East and West (Buck-Morss 2000). Scribner (2003) has argued that the post-socialist East simply reveals in more pronounced forms certain processes that have simultaneously been reshaping the post-Fordist West, and in this sense, the former would appear to represent the future of the latter.

For example, several of them could not name Germany's Chancellor.

The plan encompassed the construction of some three million apartments. According to current estimates, about 20% of East Germany's population resides in such Großsiedlungen (Hannemann 2005:155).

Indeed, material consumption and luxury seem to have been as central to the imagination of the future (and to the assessment of the present) in socialist societies as they have been in capitalist ones. Ironically, the socialist state contributed to its own undoing by inciting precisely such imaginations among its citizens (Fehérváry 2009).

For more on how post-Fordist capitalism impacted cities in the post-socialist world and beyond, see e.g. (Andrusz et al. 1996; Oswalt 2005).

To be sure, similar processes have been analyzed elsewhere (Davis 1992; Harvey 2001; Brenner & Theodore 2002). Yet unlike other locations progressively transformed by the shifting geographies of capitalism, the Getto has morphed out of a radical discontinuity in the dominant order.

Similarly alarming representations of post-reunification Plattenbauten neighborhoods as violent places terrorized by young skinheads have become commonplace in the mass media, in academic contexts, in political debates, and in literary works (Schröder 1997; ZDK 1998; Grass 2002; Staud 2005).

I use the term chronotope in the Bakhtinian sense of a fusion between word, place, and time as the organizing principle of narrative genres (Bakhtin 1998).

The term Wende (lit. turn, here translated as transition) roughly designates in Germany the period that opened with the fall of the wall and concluded with reunification.

The Treuhand was the agency entrusted with the management and privatization of all East German public property after reunification. It was shut down in 1994. Here the reference is to one of its successor agencies, which took over from it the management of public real estate in the cities.

Scholars have amply demonstrated the political significances of consumption in socialist and post-socialist contexts alike (Verdery 1992; Ten Dyke 2001; Fehérváry 2009; Klumbyte 2010). The contrast drawn here is not meant to evacuate consumption from such political significance, but rather to consider the recurring absences that mark local narratives about the transition from socialism. The narrowly defined political sphere of formal liberal democratic freedoms, a dimension of historical change that could potentially allow for a positive valuation of the transition even for those who have not benefited from it economically, was virtually absent from my informants' reflections. In contrast, the measures that Anna applies to evaluate historical change hinge upon material prosperity and are therefore unevenly distributed, making themselves available to Anna as a result of her socio-economic trajectory while remaining unavailable for others.

No doubt, through collective longing, unemployment itself may become a form of sociability, and hence generative of that which it proclaims as lost (Ralph 2008). But it does this partially at best, recuperating a mere fragment of a lifeworld that included as well the social meanings attached to waged employment (Muehlebach 2011) and to biographical trajectories of material accumulation (Sennett 1998).

For Boym, ‘restorative nostalgia … proposes to rebuild the lost home and patch up the memory gaps’. Its practitioners ‘do not think of themselves as nostalgic; they believe that their project is about truth’. Restorative nostalgia ‘characterizes national and nationalist revivals all over the world …’ In contrast, ‘reflective nostalgia dwells in … longing and loss, the imperfect process of remembrance’ (Boym 2001).

That prices in the GDR were anything but cheap (in terms of real purchasing power) or that the country hosted many foreigners (as temporary laborers, vocational trainees, or academic students) makes little difference for the images that the young generation acquires through these narratives.