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Amnesiopolis explores the construction of Marzahn, the largest
prefabricated housing project in East Germany, built on the
outskirts of East Berlin in the 1970s and 1980s, and touted by the
regime as the future of socialism. It focuses particularly on the
experience of East Germans who moved, often from crumbling slums
left over as a legacy of the nineteenth century, into this
radically new place - one defined by pure functionality and
rationality - a material manifestation of the utopian promise of
socialism. Eli Rubin employs methodologies from critical geography,
urban history, architectural history, environmental history, and
everyday life history to ask whether their experience was a radical
break with their personal pasts and the German past. Amnesiopolis
asks: can a dramatic change in spatial and material surroundings
sever the links of memory that tie people to their old life
narratives, and if so, does that help build a new socialist
mentality in the minds of historical subjects? The answer is yes
and no-as much as the East German state tried to create a
completely new socialist settlement, divorced of any links to the
pre-socialist past, the massive construction project uncovered the
truth buried-literally-in the ground, which was that the urge to
colonize the outskirts of Berlin was not new at all. Furthermore,
the construction of a new city out of nothing, using repeating,
identical buildings, created a panopticon-like effect, giving the
Stasi the possibility of more complete surveillance than they
previously had.
Eli Rubin takes an innovative approach to consumer culture to
explore questions of political consensus and consent and the impact
of ideology on everyday life in the former East Germany. Synthetic
Socialism explores the history of East Germany through the
production and use of a deceptively simple material: plastic. Rubin
investigates the connections between the communist government, its
Bauhaus-influenced designers, its retooled postwar chemical
industry, and its general consumer population. He argues that East
Germany was neither a totalitarian state nor a niche society but
rather a society shaped by the confluence of unique economic and
political circumstances interacting with the concerns of ordinary
citizens. To East Germans, Rubin says, plastic was a
high-technology material, a symbol of socialism's scientific and
economic superiority over capitalism. Most of all, the state and
its designers argued, plastic goods were of a particularly special
quality, not to be thrown away like products of the wasteful West.
Rubin demonstrates that this argument was accepted by the
mainstream of East German society, for whom the modern, socialist
dimension of a plastics-based everyday life had a deep resonance.
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