Designing One Nation

Typically, we associate a stark discrepancy in the quality and availability of consumer goods between East and West Germany with the country’s Cold War division. Media images from 1989/90 document the desire of East Germans to share in Western consumerism, rivalling political dissent as a source of unrest against the communist regime. A few years later, by contrast, nostalgic longings for Ostprodukte, goods and brands produced in the East, were among the first indicators that unification in economic, social and cultural terms would not be easily achieved for many inhabitants of the former German Democratic Republic (GDR). The post-Socialist transformations entailed a sense of loss for many of them. Yet how big was the economic and cultural divide between East and West Germany really by 1990? Katrin Schreiter’s book intends to complicate prevailing narratives of two Germanys separated by decades of Cold War ideology and fundamentally different approaches to economic matters and material culture. Instead, she argues that historians have overlooked the degree to which East and West developed in tandem, maintaining a common ‘economic culture’ through cross-border ties of trade and cultural exchanges, even at the height of the Cold War

Communism · Consumerism · Democracy · Eastern Bloc · Economic history · Economics · Economy · German · Ideology · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Sociology · European history and politics · German History and Society · History · Law