Media Markets, Mediating Labors, and the Branding of East German Culture at Super Illu

It was not so long ago that one could look at divided Germany and see a microcosm of geopolitical order. Two states with economies that ranked them among the world's leading industrial powers faced each other across the metonym of metonyms of the Cold War, the Berlin Wall. To be sure, the two Germanys' sometimes hostile, sometimes "normalized" relations with one another were influenced by the wider ebb and flow of Cold War politics. Yet they also unfolded a national and historical drama all their own. During the Cold War, both German states equally imagined themselves to be the saviors of Germany from the moral burden of the Holocaust and from the social legacy of Nazism. But above all, as both German states shared a logic of ethnic-national homogeneity (that is, a belief in the cultural indivisibility of the German Volk), the actions of the Third Reich ultimately represented a cultural crisis. Were Germans ethnotypically predisposed to genocide? In the penumbra of this anxiety, both German states crafted citizenship and identification strategies that were oddly reciprocal. Both states sought to bifurcate the "German national character" into sets of positive and negative ethnotypes. The positive ethnotypes, like "spiritual depth," were reserved as emblematic qualities of the citizens of one Germany; the negative ethnotypes, like "aggression" or "intolerance," were attributed to the citizens of the other Germany.

Both erotics and dangers were woven into these differentiation strategies. In the mirror of the other Germany's industrial power, each state saw (with subtle ethnic pride) that their fellow Germans could make "even" socialism function effectively or "even" capitalism become more humane. But the filial bonds of kinship, language, and ethnic identity were more often overshadowed by the relentless exchange of public narratives of discreditation (Borneman 1992; Boyer 2000a and 2000b). In the western variant of these narratives, the East was always depicted as the inheritor of the totalitarian "heritage" of the Third Reich. Thus eastern citizenship was construed as a perversion of cultural Germanness by unmediated state power. Likewise, in the eastern variant, the West was deemed to have inherited the same corrupting spirit of international capital that was theorized as the root of Nazism. Western citizenship and its ethos of competitive individuality were interpreted as modes of cultural degeneration owed to capitalist imperatives. As in much of the rest of the world during the Cold War, the two alternate realizations of industrial modernity, their expansive social imaginaries, and their definitions of "humanity," coexisted uneasily in divided Germany.

The unification of the two Germanys in 1990 did little to fundamentally alter these well-ingrained strategies of negotiating citizenship and national-cultural character--in fact, unification placed a greater demand upon them because the political reality of institutional and territorial sovereignties vanished, leaving behind an allegedly unified nation-state nevertheless rife with intranational differentiation (Berdahl 1999; Borneman 1992; Glaeser 2000). In the 1990s, fervent public debates in Germany sought to unequivocally identify unified Germany as the inheritor of the cultural, political, and economic legacy of the Cold War Federal Republic (FRG). ¹ Of course, these debates were heterogeneous, and even some western intellectuals called for greater recognition and incorporation of selected East German cultural and social achievements. Yet quickly, decisively, western public cultural institutions closed ranks around the FRG legacy while the political and social legacy of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) was subjected to repeated assaults as the legacy of a criminal regime. Western political elites pointed to the criminality of GDR society as the reason why they so strenuously resisted any dialogue over implementing "third way" alternatives to the economic, cultural, and institutional standards of the FRG.

In the end, the public criminalization of the GDR legacy and the lack of dialogue on societal transformation led to the often-criticized development of German unification as a unilateral process of assimilation. The old East/West differentiation strategies reemerged after the brief...