Border Encounters
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Border Encounters

Asymmetry and Proximity at Europe's Frontiers

Jutta Lauth Bacas, William Kavanagh, Jutta Lauth Bacas, William Kavanagh†

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eBook - ePub

Border Encounters

Asymmetry and Proximity at Europe's Frontiers

Jutta Lauth Bacas, William Kavanagh, Jutta Lauth Bacas, William Kavanagh†

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About This Book

Among the tremendous changes affecting Europe in recent decades, those concerning political frontiers have been some of the most significant. International borders are being opened in some regions while being redefined or reinforced in others. The social relationships of those living in these borderland regions are also changing fundamentally. This volume investigates, from a local, ground-up perspective, what is happening at some of these border encounters: face-to-face interactions and relations of compliance and confrontation, where people are bargaining, exchanging goods and information, and maneuvering beyond state boundaries. Anthropological case studies from a number of European borderlands shed light on the questions of how, and to what extent, the border context influences the changing interactions and social relationships between people at a political frontier.

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Year
2013
ISBN
9781782381389
Part I

Opening Borders

Chapter 1

Consumer Rites
The Politics of Consumption in Re-unified Germany

Daphne Berdahl
A year after the Berlin Wall fell, residents of a former East German border village were treated to a sort of collective initiation ceremony into West German society. One of many such encounters between East and West in the early days of German re-unification,1 this particular meeting entailed a ‘product promotion show’ (Werbeveranstaltung) sponsored by a West German health products company. For three hours, the 150 villagers assembled in the community hall learned about health, nutrition and the spirit of capitalism. According to a ‘renowned’ nutritional society, the company's sales representative explained, one would have to drink over thirteen litres of milk each day to receive the necessary allowance of calcium, eat two kilos of beef for the requisite daily amounts of iron, and consume a jar of honey a day to build up one's immune system through bee pollen. ‘Our health and our bodies are also forms of capital’, she informed her listeners, ‘in fact they may be the only form of capital we possess. We need to invest in them, like money in the bank.’
To eliminate the need for such huge quantities of food, she was offering a ‘course of treatment’ (Kur) of tablets, powders and vitamins that would clear arteries and reduce cholesterol within thirty days. Although the ‘treatment’ usually sold for DM 964, she announced, the first ten buyers would receive it at half price. For those villagers who were unemployed or retired, the full price of the ‘treatment’ nearly equalled a month's income.
Throughout the evening, this saleswoman used a variety of strategies to promote her products. Alluding to the mounting tensions and suspicions between East and West Germans throughout the country (ironically through people and practices like hers), she said: ‘Today I want to restore trust.’ Her tone was both paternalistic and patronizing as she presented herself as an educator, invested with authority as a self-proclaimed nutritionist and as a westerner. ‘Invest in yourself’, she urged members of the audience, invoking the languages of production and consumption while privileging the values of western individualism. Her frequent references to the body as ‘capital’ were a central aspect of her presentation's ‘educational’ function. Like many other advertisers, she was selling belonging.2 But by linking her products' purported benefits to certain rules and values of western capitalism and consumption, she was also selling access to, or entry into, the new society: her actions entailed the work of making citizen-subjects. By the end of the evening, she had sold ten ‘treatments’ as well as numerous other products ranging from rugs and pillows to garlic pills.
I begin with this ‘promotional show’ for it provides much food for thought: it not only reflects the construction of Otherness in East and West through particular discourses about the body, but also illustrates how consumption became a realm in which and through which many of the dynamics between East and West were experienced, expressed, negotiated and contested. The acquisition of a certain ‘cultural competence’ (Bourdieu 1977) in consumption, I argue, became a central initiation rite for eastern Germans into West German society. Although my focus is on re-unified Germany, the complex dynamic of consumption I examine here is part of a much larger dynamic present in the globalization of consumption-oriented market economies, particularly in post-socialist societies.3 Indeed, in the context of post-socialist transitions in eastern Europe, we should be reminded of the degree to which eastern-bloc political economies’ inability to either shield their populations from the consumption ‘triumphs’ of the West or to in any way match them was one main cause of their collapse (Bauman 1992; Borneman 1991; Drakulic 1991).
As anthropological approaches to the study of consumption have shown (Berdahl 1999a; Friedman 1994; Liechty 2003; McCracken 1988; Miller 1994, 1995a, 1995b; Orlove and Rutz 1989), cultural practices of consumption are far more complex than the simple competition involved in buying and selling. The consumption I examine here, for example, was deeply embedded in the asymmetrical power relations between East and West, demonstrating that consumption has important political and symbolic dimensions (Appadurai 1986; Ferguson 1988). It is a gendered and gendering activity (De Grazia 1996; Mills 1997). It became, and to some extent remains, a form of resistance or oppositional practice.4 In the former GDR, it has entailed the construction and negotiation of memories and nostalgia for former life ways that are in contest with emerging ‘all-German’ life ways. And, drawing from Arjun Appadurai's insight that ‘from a theoretical point of view human actors encode things with significance, [while] from a methodological point of view it is the things-in-motion that illuminate their social context’ (Appadurai 1986: 5), it involves what people actually do with things. In sum, I view consumption here not as a distinct sphere of cultural or economic life, but as something that permeates, and is permeated by, complex negotiations of identity, gender and memory within changing political and economic structures.
My aim in this chapter is to explore transformations in cultural meanings and practices of consumption since the fall of the Berlin Wall. By focusing on both productive consumption and the consumption of production, I attempt to destabilize traditional binaries of consumption and production that have characterized many consumption studies both within and outside of anthropology. Studies of consumption have similarly emphasized polarities of resistance and domination (Löfgren n.d.; Miller 1995b); in this essay I also attempt to offer a more nuanced notion of resistance (see also Abu-Lughod 1990; Ortner 1995), particularly in the realm of consumption. Further, my discussion of the politics of consumption both during and after socialist rule highlights certain continuities between socialism and post-socialism, thereby challenging, like other recent ethnographic studies of post-socialist transitions (Berdahl 1999a; Caldwell 2004; Dunn 2004; Hann 1993; Lampland 1995; Nagengast 1991; Verdery 1996), notions of total rupture (the ‘big bang’ scenario; see Verdery 1996) present in many popular representations of socialism's collapse.
My study derives from a borderland situation where the politics of consumption have been articulated in a variety of social spaces. Kella, the village where I conducted fieldwork between 1990 and 1992, is located directly on and is halfway encircled by the former border between East and West Germany. It was, and to some extent remains, a true borderland both literally and metaphorically – a place where identities are especially articulated as well as a transitional zone, a place betwixt and between cultures.5 At the time of my fieldwork, Kella was, as Gloria Anzaldúa wrote of her borderland, ‘a vague and undetermined place created by the emotional residue of an unnatural boundary. It is in a constant state of transition’ (Anzaldúa 1987: 3).
Following the Wende in 1989 (the ‘transition’ or ‘turn’, the term used to refer to the fall of the Wall and collapse of socialist rule), much of the daily interaction between Kella's 600 residents and its neighbours to the west occurred while shopping. It is thus no accident, perhaps, that consumption became a central metaphor for East-West distinctions, a space where differences were most marked before and after the Wall fell.

Consuming Passions

Long before the fall of the Wall, of course, power and wealth imbalances between East and West were reflected most visibly in the realm of consumption. The eastern bloc ‘economies of shortage’ (Kornai 1992) contrasted sharply with the affluence and abundance of consumer goods in the West, and nowhere was this disparity more evident than in divided Germany. Anyone who visited Berlin before 1989 will recall the contrast between the Ku'damm and Unter den Linden. Local- and state-level practices, including the exchange of people for western currency, West German state loans to the GDR, images on western television (whose airwaves easily crossed the otherwise impermeable border) and the coveted Westpakete (western packages) full of chocolates, coffee and hand-me-down clothing for eastern relatives reflected this imbalance and confirmed an image of the ‘golden West’ as a world where ‘everything shines’ (alles glänzt), a paradise that, if attained, could solve most every problem.6 As the Yugoslavian writer Slavenka Drakuliç noted: ‘Sometimes I think that the real Iron Curtain is made up of silky, shiny images. … These images that cross the borders in magazines, movies, or videos are … more dangerous than any secret weapon, because they make one desire that “otherness” badly enough to risk one's life by trying to escape. Many did’ (Drakuliç 1991: 27–28).
This observation also reflects why consumption under socialism was deeply politicized. The socialist ‘ideology of rational distribution’ (Konrad and Szelenyi 1979), which defined the centralized appropriation and distribution of surplus as being in the common interest of all citizens, depicted consumption in terms of the collective good rather than individual entitlement. The fact that the promise of redistribution was rarely met was a key factor in the ‘politicization of consumption’ under socialism (Verdery 1996: 28). In Kella, for example, dust-free displays of rare crystal and the wearing of western jeans were not only markers of distinction (see Berdahl 1999a); they were also intensely political acts. A blue Aral Gasoline bumper sticker posted on the inside of a cupboard, or red and green adhesive packaging peeled from a West German Wurst and stuck underneath the kitchen table, similarly entailed what Verdery has described as the forging of ‘resistant political identities’ through consumption (1996: 29). Further, the communist (SED) party in the GDR (as elsewhere in socialist eastern Europe) frequently measured the regime's success in material terms, reflected especially in its well-known slogan referring to West German postwar progress and abundance: ‘outdistance without catching up.’7 Such measurements of success and frequent assurances of imminent improvements in the standard of living, combined with constant deprivations in daily life (especially during the last decades of socialist rule), not only politicized consumption but also stimulated consumer desire (Borneman 1991; Verdery 1996). As John Borneman has argued, this combination of deprivation and stimulation structured much of East Germans' behaviour as consumers after the collapse of socialist rule: ‘Socialism had trained them to desire. Capitalism stepped in to let them buy’ (Borneman 1991: 81).
Immediately after the fall of the Wall, one of the most pervasive images was that of East Germans on a frenetic, collective shopping spree. Although, as noted above, these consumption practices were largely the product of a cultural order formed under an economy of scarcity, West German discourses hailed the triumph of capitalism and democracy as reflected and confirmed in the Konsumrausch (‘consuming frenzy’) of the Ossis (East Germans). Local and national newspapers carried numerous photos of East Germans gawking at western products; a typical newspaper headline, for example, read ‘Waiting, Marvelling, Buying’. The DM 100 Begrüßungsgeld (‘welcome money’) that the West German state handed to all first-time visitors from the GDR and spontaneous gifts of cash from individual West Germans not only helped finance the easterners' spending spree, but also accentuated the discrepancies between East and West by placing westerners in the dominant position of gift-giver. As one villager recalled: ‘I found the “welcome money” embarrassing. It made me feel like a beggar. And when a Westler tried to hand me twenty marks, telling me to buy something nice with it, I tried to give it back. I was so ashamed.’
Consumption became an important symbolic marker of this historical moment (represented most tangibly in what people chose to purchase with their ‘welcome money’) but was also constitutive of the meaning of the transition (Wende) itself: state socialism collapsed not merely because of a political failure, but because of its failure, quite literally, ‘to deliver the goods’ (Borneman 1991: 252). The drab and clumsy East German products that embodied this failure were quickly collected as ‘camp’8 by West Germans while the easterners who had made them resoundingly rejected them. Museum displays of GDR products similarly affirmed and constructed an image of socialist backwardness as reflected in and constituted by its quaint and outdated products. As one catalogue from a museum exhibit in Frankfurt shortly after the Wende read: ‘East Germany has unwittingly preserved fossils of articles which, twenty to thirty years ago, were near and dear to us … [It is] high time then to embark upon a lightning archeological excursion into the world of consumer goods before this distinctive quality is submerged beneath the tide of Western goods’ (Bertsch 1990: 7).9
More than any other product, the East German Trabant (Trabi) quickly became a key symbol not only of the GDR, but of socialist inefficiency, backwardness and inferiority. A small, boxy car made of fibreglass and pressed cotton, the Trabi with its two-stroke engine contrasted sharply with the fast West German Mercedes, Porsches, and BMWs. Indeed, as Robert Darnton observed, this contrast in cars could not help but embody ‘the two Germanys: one super-modern, hard-driving, serious, and fast; the other archaic, inefficient, absurd, and slow, but with a lot of heart’ (Darnton 1991: 155). In the GDR, East Germans often waited fifteen years and paid the equivalent of two annual salaries to obtain one. With the fall of the Wall, the Trabi was not only rendered valueless in monetary terms, but was at first affectionately, and then as relations between East and West Germans grew increasingly hostile, antagonistically ridiculed in West German jokes as well as in everyday interactions.10
This consumption metaphor became increasingly prevalent as the hopes for a ‘third way’ of the 1989 protest movements were lost in the rush to German unity. Leftist critics in the GDR lamented their country's ‘sell-out’ to capitalism, for example, while West Germans derided the consumerism of their Ossi neighbours. East Germans themselves described being ‘bought’ by the West, as the following lines from a letter written just days after the fall of the Wall by a young man from Kella reflects: ‘Maybe [the West Germans] will destroy the GDR this way [through the 'welcome money']. It's like an investment. They buy the GDR citizens … and then they won't want to remain GDR citizens anymore.’ Indeed, ‘Deutschmark nationalism,’ a term Jürgen Habermas coined to describe what he saw (and feared) as a rise in nationalist sentiment based on the promise of a consumer-oriented market economy supported by the almighty Deutschmark,11 is widely viewed as having been the driving force behind the landslide victory of the coalition parties associated with Helmut Kohl's Christian Democratic Party in the East German elections of March 1990.12

Consumer Rites

Consumption was not only a metaphor for East-West distinctions before and immediately following the fall of the Wall, however. It was also a means of preserving and reconstructing them. Indeed, consumption was part of a process through which the once political boundary that divided East and West Germany was replaced by the maintenance, indeed invention, of a cultural one. In the taxonomies of classification – of identifying who was an Ossi and who was a Wessi – that became part of the construction of Otherness on both sides of the former border after the Wall fell (Korff 1990), the lack of a certain cultural fluency in consumption quickly emerged as a key marker of an Ossi. In the first years after the Wende, for example, the stereotypical insecure Ossi walked with her head down and asked the store clerk not ‘where’ a specific item was, but ‘do you have it?’13 Whereas West Germans referred to certain products by their brand names – such as ‘Tempo’ for a tissue or ‘Uhu’ for glue – East Germans described their function. When people described differences between East and West Germans, they frequently pointed only to consumption practices. ‘Ossis compare prices’, I was often told. ‘Wessis always know what they want to buy.’ It was usually during shopping trips in an adjacent western town that people would recriminate themselves for behaving like an ‘Ossi’. ‘Now she probably knows I'm an Ossi’, one woman whispered to me about the bakery clerk. ‘I didn't know what that bread was called.’
The perceived backwardness of East German products was often projected onto the bodies of East Germans themselves. In the first years after the fall of the Wall, clothing, grooming, make-up, even smell were identifying markers of Ossis. According to a discourse of Otherness in the West, Ossis could be identified by their pale faces, oily hair, washed-out shapeless jeans, generic grey shoes and acrylic shopping bags. They smelled of body odour, cheap perfume or ‘that peculiar disinfectant’. Wessis, on the other hand, were recognizable by their stylish outfits, chic haircuts, Gucci shoes, tan complexions and ecologically correct burlap shopping bags. They smelled of Estée Lauder or Polo for men. In describing eastern German women, for ...

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