The Historic Cityscape and the Unified Nation -- Heimat Eisenach -- Cultural Heritage and Germanness -- Heritage Fetishism and the Heimat Imaginary -- Claiming Cultural Belongings -- Redemption and the Voice of Trauma
Summary
"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"--Provided by publisher
