Monographs
WHAT REMAINS
Everyday Encounters with the Socialist Past in Germany
Columbia University Press, 2017
What happens when an entire modern state's material culture becomes abruptly obsolete? How do ordinary people encounter what remains? In this ethnography, Jonathan Bach examines the afterlife of East Germany following the fall of the Berlin Wall, as things and places from that vanished socialist past continue to circulate and shape the politics of memory.
What Remains traces the unsettling effects of these unmoored artifacts on the German present, arguing for a rethinking of the role of the everyday as a site of reckoning with difficult pasts. Bach juxtaposes four sites where the stakes of the everyday appear: products commodified as nostalgia, amateur museums dedicated to collecting everyday life under socialism, the "people's palace" that captured the national imagination through its destruction, and the feared and fetishized Berlin Wall. Moving from the local, the intimate, and the small to the national, the impersonal, and the large, this book's interpenetrating chapters show the unexpected social and political force of the ordinary in the production of memory. What Remains offers a unique vantage point on the workings of the everyday in situations of radical discontinuity, contributing to new understandings of postsocialism and the intricate intersection of material remains and memory.
Reviewed in American Anthropologist, American Journal of Sociology, Choice, German History, German Studies Review, Perspectives on Politics, Public Seminar, Любословие/Ljuboslovie
German Translation of What Remains:
Die Spuren der DDR
Von Ostprodukten bis zu den Resten der Berliner Mauer
Translated by Ursula Blank-Sangmeister / Published by Reclam Verlag, 2019
Book of the Year 2019, “Thought Provoking” (Denkanstöße) category (3rd place), Damals magazine (Germany).
Between Sovereignty and Integration
German Foreign Policy and National Identity after 1989
St. Martin’s Press, 1999
In one of the first English-language studies of German foreign policy in the immediate period following reunification, Bach explores Germany’s historic 1995 decision to send troops to former Yugoslavia — the first use of German ground troops in a combat situation since the Second World War. He shows how shifting understandings about what it means for the German state to be “normal,” “responsible” or “moral” were decisive in the decision to deploy troops to try and stop the genocide in Bosnia. Placing the German debates in social and historical context, he identifies the major divergent interpretations of national identity within the German foreign policy community. Through an in-depth discursive analysis of key parliamentary debates, Bach highlights how the emergence of a ""normal"" foreign policy became caught between competing understandings of the nation and the ambiguous role of the state, as both increasingly confronted the uncertain trajectories of European integration and globalization. Mixing theoretical and empirical analyses, Bach charts the tension between universalism and particularism in German foreign policy and national identity from Germany's first unification to its most recent. The implications reach beyond Germany to shed light on the paradoxical relationship between politics, policy and identity amidst changing conceptions of state, nation, and the international system.
Reviewed in European Security, German History, German Studies Review, International Affairs, International Politics, International Studies Review, Millennium: Journal of International Studies. German edition published by LIT Verlag.
Edited volumes
RE-CENTERING THE CITy
Global Mutations of Socialist Modernity
University College London Press, 2020 / Co-edited with Michal Murawski
What is the role of monumentality, verticality and centrality in the twenty-first century? Are palaces, skyscrapers and grand urban ensembles obsolete relics of twentieth-century modernity, inexorably giving way to a more humble and sustainable de-centered urban age? Or do the aesthetics and politics of pomp and grandiosity rather linger and even prosper in the cities of today and tomorrow?
Re-Centring the City zooms in on these questions, taking as its point of departure the experience of Eurasian socialist cities, where twentieth-century high modernity arguably saw its most radical and furthest-reaching realisation. It frames the experience of global high modernity (and its unravelling) through the eyes of the socialist city, rather than the other way around: instead of explaining Warsaw or Moscow through the prism of Paris or New York, it refracts London, Mexico City and Chennai through the lens of Kyiv, Simferopol and the former Polish shtetls. This transdisciplinary volume re-centres the experiences of the ‘Global East’, and thereby our understanding of world urbanism, by shedding light on some of the still-extant (and often disavowed) forms of ‘zombie’ centrality, hierarchy and violence that pervade and shape our contemporary urban experience.
Learning from Shenzhen
CHINA’S POST-MAO EXPERIMENT FROM SPECIAL ZONE TO MODEL CITY
University of Chicago Press, 2017 / Co-edited with Mary Ann O’Donnell and Winnie Wong
This path-breaking multidisciplinary volume presents an account of China’s contemporary transformation via one of its most important yet overlooked cities: Shenzhen, located just north of Hong Kong. In recent decades, Shenzhen has transformed from an experimental site for economic reform into a dominant city at the crossroads of the global economy. The first of China’s special economic zones, Shenzhen is today a UNESCO City of Design and the hub of China’s technology industries.
Bringing China studies into dialogue with urban studies, Learning from Shenzhen highlights the pivotal role that two legacies from the Maoist era—rural collectives and urban work units—played in the city’s emergence through their negotiations with state power and capital. With cases drawn from a cross-section of city life, including public health, labor, architecture, gender, politics, and education, the essays show empirically how the city is not a linear development from plan to policy to execution, but a product of a strategic ambiguity that allows for the co-evolution of the planned and unplanned. The book argues that urban villagers and migrant workers enable social transformation, co-opting and refusing easy incorporation into narratives of economic development, urban planning, or neoliberalism. Offering scholars and general readers alike an unprecedented look at one of the world’s most dynamic metropolises, this collective history uses the urban case study to explore critical problems and possibilities relevant for modern-day China and beyond.
Reviewed in China Quarterly, China Perspectives, Pacific Affairs, Carnet du Centre China, Buildings & Landscapes
Chinese Translation 马立安、黄韵然、乔纳森∙巴赫（主编）《向深圳学习---中国改革开放时期从经济特区到模范城市的试验目录》Haitian Publishers, 2020. Translated by Wang Lidi.
Translation
Warfare since the Second World War
by Klaus-Jürgen Gantzel and Torsten Schwinghammer
Translation from German to English by Jonathan Bach
Transaction Publishers, 2000
[From the back cover] Warfare Since the Second World War presents a wealth of analysis and data about one of the most pressing questions of our time: why does war continue to plague us fifty years after World War II? This book argues that the nature of war has shifted from inter-state conflicts toward internal conflicts, above all civil war. Low-intensity conflict helps explain the constant increase in wars over the last fifty years and makes it probable this trend will continue. Gantzel and Schwinghammer argue that modern warfare reflects a continuation of the nation-state-building process begun in nineteenth-century Europe. In addition to their insightful analysis, the authors provide a detailed list of all wars fought from 1945 to 1995.