What Remains

Sharon Macdonald, Institut für Europäische Ethnologie, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin:
Jonathan Bach weaves his way elegantly and insightfully through Berlin’s postunification landscape, highlighting the absences, unsettlements, and inheritances from the past. In doing so, he shows not only the potency of what remains but also the creativity with which it is addressed and new futures forged. This is a wonderful, highly readable, yet deeply sophisticated book.

Serguei Oushakine, Princeton University:
What Remains is a perceptive and—perhaps more crucially—a very sympathetic account of multiple ways through which ordinary people try to take hold of their politically controversial past. Bach creates an intricate but highly accessible story about the past that is not quite gone.

Katherine Verdery, the Graduate Center of the City University of New York:
In this wonderful book, Jonathan Bach shows the complexity of East Germans' adjustment to their new reality. Examining preferred consumption items, personal museums of things from the past, demolitions and rebuildings, and memorializations of the Wall, he goes well beyond fashionable invocations of "nostalgia" to explore unification's assaults on personhood and identity, on senses of place and history. A must read!