Despite the three decades that have passed since the fall of the Berlin Wall, the historical narrative of East Germany is hardly fixed in public memory, as German society continues to grapple with the legacies of the Cold War. This fascinating ethnography looks at two very different types of local institutions in one eastern German state that take divergent approaches to those legacies: while publicly funded organizations reliably cast the GDR as a dictatorship, a main regional newspaper offers a more ambivalent perspective colored by the experiences and concerns of its readers. As author Anselma Gallinat shows, such memory work-initially undertaken after fundamental regime change-inevitably shapes citizenship and democracy in the present.

It is commonly acknowledged that anthropologists use personal experiences to inform their writing. However, it is often assumed that only fieldwork experiences are relevant and that the personal appears only in the form of self-reflexivity. This book takes a step beyond anthropology at home and auto-ethnography and shows how anthropologists can include their memories and experiences as ethnographic data in their writing. It discusses issues such as authenticity, translation and ethics in relation to the self, and offers a new perspective on doing ethnographic fieldwork.

Despite the three decades that have passed since the fall of the Berlin Wall, the historical narrative of East Germany is hardly fixed in public memory, as German society continues to grapple with the legacies of the Cold War. This fascinating ethnography looks at two very different types of local institutions in one eastern German state that take divergent approaches to those legacies: while publicly funded organizations reliably cast the GDR as a dictatorship, a main regional newspaper offers a more ambivalent perspective colored by the experiences and concerns of its readers. As author Anselma Gallinat shows, such memory work-initially undertaken after fundamental regime change-inevitably shapes citizenship and democracy in the present.

..".an excellent collection of anthropological autobiographical essays focusing on the positionality and resource of the self in ethnography...The essays are engaging and well written... and] remind me of some of those classic anthropological / ethnographic collections - interesting in their own right to read, but also serving as a good teaching resource." . Amanda Coffey, Cardiff University

It is commonly acknowledged that anthropologists use personal experiences to inform their writing. However, it is often assumed that only fieldwork experiences are relevant and that the personal appears only in the form of self-reflexivity. This book takes a step beyond anthropology at home and auto-ethnography and shows how anthropologists can include their memories and experiences as ethnographic data in their writing. It discusses issues such as authenticity, translation and ethics in relation to the self, and offers a new perspective on doing ethnographic fieldwork.

Peter Collins received his PhD in Social Anthropology from the University of Manchester in 1994 and is currently Senior Lecturer in the Department of Anthropology at Durham University. He was previously a Lecturer in Development Studies at the University of Manchester. He is the author of numerous articles, and his primary research interests are religion, space and place, narrative theory and qualitative methods.

Anselma Gallinat received a PhD in Social Anthropology from the University of Durham in 2002 and has worked as a Research Assistant and Associate on applied projects. She is currently a Lecturer in Sociology at Newcastle University (UK). She has worked on questions of sociocultural change, narrative, identity, and most recently memory and morality in eastern Germany."