Preservation And National Belonging In Eastern Germany

Preservation and National Belonging in Eastern Germany explores the ways everyday citizens grapple with a difficult national past through heritage. East Germans struggle with an identity doubly burdened by Nazism and socialism, and many seek to manage these burdens by laying claim to a redemptive national past in the form of architectural heritage and the hometown cityscape.

Understood as cultural and local rather than political and national, heritage and the hometown appear morally untainted - not only distinct from but also victimized by forces outside the boundaries of this uncorrupted Germanness. For these East Germans, redemption lies in claiming the role of hometown citizen committed to protecting an endangered cultural identity.

Based on extensive ethnographic research, and drawing on cultural anthropology and cultural studies, the analysis sheds new light on the everyday politics heritage and memory by highlighting the dynamics longing, fantasy, fetishism, and local performance. Review: 'Jason James has written a beautiful book, one that shows the massive virtues of anthropological research into national identity.

Heritage is not just a context, but an active construction of real people in real time. Preservation and National Belonging in Eastern Germany is a nuanced portrait of people struggling to make meaning in a landscape fraught with competing pressures, and captures the complexities of that process exceptionally well.' - Jeffrey Olick, University of Virginia, USA