The Wages of Germanness: Working-Class Recomposition and (Racialized) National Identity After Unification

Juliane Edler

Journal of Contemporary Central and Eastern Europe, 2010, vol. 18, issue 3, 313-339

Abstract: This anti-racist, historically informed analysis of the transition process in East Germany in the early 1990s challenges dominant approaches, which-occluding taken-for-granted notions of ethno-racial “belonging” to the nation and the ethno-racial coordinates of Germany's citizenship and immigration policies – frame racism in post-unification Germany as an exclusively East German problem. I argue that the shift from a democratic revolution to the liberal project of unification was absolutely crucial: as working class people in East Germany relinquished their claims to radical democracy, they were compensated by the wages of Germanness, i.e. membership in the unified state and the “whiteGerman” nation.

Date: 2010
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DOI: 10.1080/0965156X.2010.533866

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