Friday, March 14, 2014
Presidential Board Room (Omni Shoreham)
This paper considers the historicity of monetary value as a method of tracing the temporal effects of the 1990 currency union between West and East Germany. Specifically, it examines the project of ‘building up the east' after the end of socialism, and in the shadow of a currency union that in its re-valuation of the socio-monetary order, is widely understood to have contributed to the collapse of industry and loss of workplaces in East Germany after unification. Based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Leipzig (east) and Frankfurt am Main (west), drawing on document analysis, interpretation of cultural media, and interviews with central bankers, former East German state elites, dissidents, and ordinary citizens, I trace the remainders of the 1990 currency union as a site of memory and critique. I show how policies, discourses, and personal recollections enact and depend upon multiple and competing conceptualizations of time and forms of evaluating capitalist and socialist histories. In turn, these understandings and arguments reanimate and rework formal economic measures of value. How and on what terms can the east “catch up” economically to the west? In what ways do the “temporary” formal legal wage and pension differentials between east and west authorize and complicate claims about the temporality of economic reform, fiscal obligation, and differing imaginaries of social justice in unified Germany? I suggest how the technical measures that underlie currency union projects (both German and European) are cultural and moral forms that are reworked by differently positioned subjects, at new historical conjunctures.
