Modern Hungers: Food and Power in Twentieth-Century Germany by Alice Weinreb, and: Imaginations 8-1: New Research on East Germany ed. by Marc Silberman

Abstract

Listen

Translate article

Reviewed by: Modern Hungers: Food and Power in Twentieth-Century Germanyby Alice Weinreb, and: Imaginations 8-1: New Research on East Germanyed. by Marc Silberman Matthias Rothe Modern Hungers: Food and Power in Twentieth-Century Germany. By Alice Weinreb. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017. Pp. 317. Cloth $44.99. ISBN 978-0190605117. Imaginations 8-1: New Research on East Germany. Edited by Marc Silberman. Imaginations: Journal of Cross-Cultural Image Studies http://imaginations.csj.ualberta.ca/?p=9471. 05 21, 2017. The special edition of Imaginationson "New Research on East Germany," edited by Marc Silberman, offers a thematic introduction by the editor, a visual essay, and seven articles by scholars of literature, film, performance, history, and art history. It is thus a multidisciplinary endeavor that not only revisits particular aspects of East German society: communalism in a housing project (Eli Rubin), popular taste (Alice Weinreb), and the medical system (Sonja Klocke), but also East Germany's dissolution and legacy. Maria Hetzer presents performances based on women's memories of the time of political transition, Jake P. Smith discusses the arrival of West German countercultural groups in the East, and April Eisman undertakes a meticulous analysis of post-Wende exhibitions of East German art. Moreover, art as a source of (historical) knowledge is the subject of Tobias Ebbrecht-Hartmann's analysis of Thomas Heise's films, and of Benjamin Robinson's rereading of Anna Seghers' novel, Die Entscheidung(1959). The diversity of topics and approaches nevertheless demonstrates an overall [End Page 434]coherence, owed to the recurrence of themes and historical moments, and to the fact that the authors workshopped their papers together. The title of this edition might strike some readers as a paradox: what can be new about something that has long ceased to exist? Marc Silberman anticipates such bewilderment. Many sources, he explains, people as well as archives, became accessible only after the end of East Germany and are still waiting to be discovered. More importantly, a new generation of scholars is at work, no longer constrained by a Cold War mindset. They don't have to condemn or defend anymore and hence two complementary approaches become possible: toward the small, the quotidian reality of habits and encounters, and toward the big, that resituates East Germany within larger (global) sites of conflicts and tensions. Ideological distance has provided an opportunity. Although the second approach, the view from the bird's-eye perspective of the global, is almost entirely absent in this edition, readers will nevertheless find many surprising insights in the explorations of East German Lebenswelten. What comes into view is the daily "management" of contradictions inherent to life in East Germany—for the most part contradictions between socialist ideals and the proper dynamics of practice. Alice Weinreb, for example, discusses the fact that East Germany, much like many other industrialized nations—the global is present here by implication—began to deal with an obesity problem at the end of the 1970s, evidencing that material well-being does not necessarily equal progress. Sonja Klocke, drawing on literature and film, describes a medical system that simultaneously empowered and disempowered its patients. Thomas Heise's documentary method—elaborated convincingly by Tobbias Ebbrecht-Hartmann—can almost be understood as the methodological premise of such historical-ethnographic or, in the case of Maria Hetzer's visual essay, artistic inquiries. They all gather "remnants of GDR history and develop strategies for making them readable in the present," not only as something that has failed, but also "as testimony to potential and unrealized futures" (Ebbrecht-Hartmann, n.p.). April Eisman's analysis of post-1989 East German art exhibitions exposes a central obstacle to such constructive appropriation of the past: history as it is rewritten from the point of view of the victor. Yet ideological distance can also be a danger. There is undoubtedly something liberating in the fact that the analytical frameworks long used to portrait East German society have become obsolete. However, dismissing them does not enable one to then see "socialism itself" (Rubin, n.p.), neither does it mean that the space is now cleared and one can start over, in theory and topic. The wasteland that West...