Inventing a Socialist Nation
- Release Date: 02/11/2009
- Country of Issue: United Kingdom
- Category: Academic and professional books
Twenty years after the collapse of the German Democratic Republic (GDR), historians still struggle to explain how an apparently stable state imploded with such vehemence. Author Jan Palmowski’s new book combines cultural and political history with anthropological approaches to shed new light on the subject, coinciding with the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall.
Inventing a Socialist Nation: Heimat and the Politics of Everyday Life in the GDR, 1945–90 is the first book to show how ‘national’ identity was invented in the GDR and how citizens engaged with it.
Palmowski argues it was hard for individuals to identify with the GDR amid the threat of Stasi informants and with the accelerating urban and environmental decay of the 1970s and 1980s. Since socialism contradicted its own ideals of community, identity and environmental care, citizens developed rival meanings of nationhood and identities and learned to mask their growing distance from socialism beneath regular public assertions of socialist belonging. This stabilised the party’s rule until 1989.
Yet when the revolution came, the alternative identifications citizens had developed for decades allowed them to abandon their ‘nation’, the GDR, with remarkable ease.
With this book, Palmowski makes a major contribution to the history of everyday life in the GDR, the history of nationalism in Eastern Europe and the history of modern Germany.
ENDS
Notes for Editors:
Inventing a Socialist Nation | Jan Palmowski | Hardback | 9780521111775 | To publish November 2009 | £60.00 |376 pages
About the Author
Jan Palmowski is a professor of Modern History and European Studies, and Head of the school of Arts and Humanities at King’s College, London. He has appeared on BBC and CNN as an expert commentator.
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