For over three decades my research has explored how Germany’s layered, difficult pasts reshape the present. I first explored how the desire to be “normal” drove major policy decisions about the use of the German military in the early years after reunification. From there I turned to the uneasy place of former East Germany in the united imaginary, especially the thorny question of how to account for everyday life under the socialist regime and the ambiguous meanings of its material remains.

My current project, tentatively entitled “Imperial Ambiguities: Colonial Pasts in Germany’s Present," asks what happens when the approaches developed to confront the National Socialist or East German past encounter the task of addressing the injustices and legacy of colonialism. It seeks to situate Germany within a larger belated reckoning with the colonial past that is taking place across the Global North, and thereby to contribute to urgent public conversations and existing scholarly literatures about how key societal actors interpret and act upon their understandings of responsibility to the past in a democratic state.

Books on Germany

In progress Imperial Ambiguities: Colonial Pasts in Germany’s Present

2017 What Remains: Everyday Encounters with the Socialist Past in Germany. Columbia University Press.

• German translation: Die Spuren der DDR: Von Ostprodukten bis zu den Resten der Berliner Mauer. 2019: Reclam Verlag (Germany). A “book of the year” from Damals magazine.

1999 Between Sovereignty and Integration: German Foreign Policy and National Identity after 1989. St. Martin’s Press.

SPECIAL JOURNAL ISSUE

2021     “Myths of Innocence in German Public Memory,” Special Issue of German Politics & Society, Volume 39 (1), co-edited with Benjamin Nienass.

Articles and Book Chapters on Germany

2024     “Provenance-Centered Reckoning: A Memory Infrastructure for the Colonial Past?” Berliner Blätter: Ethnographiche und ethnologische Beiträge (Berlin Journal for Ethnology), No. 89, pp. 43-59.

2021    “Brand of Brothers? The Humboldt Forum and the Myths of Innocence.” German Politics & Society, 39 (1), 100-111.

2021 “Introduction: Myths of Innocence in German Public Memory.” With Benjamin Nienass, German Politics & Society, 39 (1), 1-14.

2021 “Material Culture and the Emergence of Ostalgie” (“Materielle Kultur und die Entstehung der „Ostalgie“: Die Bedeutung von Alltagsobjekten in der Erinnerung an der DDR”) (In German). In Monica Rüthers, editor, “Gute Erinnerungen an böse Zeiten – Nostalgie in ‘posttotalitären’ Erinnerungsdiskursen nach 1945 und 1989,” Munich: Schriften des Historisches Kollegs 6, 117-126.

2020 “Berlin’s Empty Centre: A Double Take.” In Jonathan Bach and Michal Murawski, eds., Re-Centring the City: Urban Mutations, Socialist Afterlives, and the Global East, University College London Press, pp. 79-89.

2019 “Colonial Pasts in Germany’s Present.” German Politics and Society, Volume 37(4).

2018 “Exit Ghost.” In A. Dana Weber, ed., Performativity: Life, Stage, Screen. Reflections on a Transdisciplinary Concept. Berlin, Germany: Lit Verlag, pp. 93-104.

2017 “Objects” (with Cristina Cuevas-Wolf and Dani Kranz). In Andrew S. Bergerson and Leonard Schmieding et al., Ruptures in the Everyday: Views of Modern Germany from the Ground. Berghahn Publishers, pp. 113-142.

2016 “The Berlin Wall after the Berlin Wall: Turning Site into Sight.” Memory Studies, Volume 9(1), pp. 48-62.

2015 “Collecting Communism: Private Museums of Everyday Life under Socialism in former East Germany.” German Politics and Society, Volume 33 (1-2), pp. 135-145.

2015 “Object Lessons: Tactility and Visuality in Museums of the Socialist Everyday.” In Peter McIssac and Gabriele Muller, eds., Exhibiting the German Past: Museums, Film, and Musealization. University of Toronto Press, pp. 123-137.

2014 “Consuming Communism: Material Cultures of Nostalgia in former East Germany.” In Olivia Ange and David Berliner, eds., Anthropology and Nostalgia. Berghahn Publishers, pp. 123-138.

2013 “Memory Landscapes and the Labor of the Negative in Berlin.” International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society, Volume 26(1), pp. 31-40.

2005 “Vanishing Acts and Virtual Reconstructions: Technologies of Memory and the Afterlife of the GDR.” In Silke Arnold-de Simine, ed., Memory Traces: 1989 and the Question of German Cultural Identity. Peter Lang, pp. 261-280.

2004 “Komunismus jako zbozí?” (“Communism as Commodity?”) Fórum architektury a stavitelství (Forum of Architecture and Construction), Prague, Czech Republic, No. 4-5.

2002 “’The Taste Remains’: Consumption, (N)ostalgia and the Production of East Germany.” Public Culture, Volume 14(3), pp. 545-556.

2002 “The New Spirit of German Geopolitics” (with Susanne Peters). Geopolitics, Volume 7(3), pp. 1-18.

2001 “Cultural Identity and the Legacy of the GDR: ‘Eastproducts’ and Television after Unification.” [in German] (with Karin Wehn). In Wolfgang Schluchter and Peter Quint, eds., Der Vereinigungsschock [The Shock of Unification]. Velbrück Wissenschaft, pp. 312-335.

1998 “Germany after Unification and Eastern Europe: New Perspectives, New Problems.” Intermarium, Volume 3(1), pp. 1-13.

1998 “Deploying Soldiers, Deploying Words.” Peace Review, Volume 10(4), pp. 567-603.

One of the more unusual public acknowledgements of my work was on display at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, where my work on nostalgia for socialism appeared as a direct quote in part of the artist Dorit Margreiter’s piece “zentrum” in the 2013 exhibit “Performing Histories.”

Related teaching: The Wall: Berlin and Beyond; Politics of Memory; Post-Socialist Modernity: The Afterlife of Utopia; Uncanny Appearances