Accounting for Money: Keeping the Ledger of Monetary Memory in Germany
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Accounting for Money: Keeping the Ledger of Monetary Memory in Germany A Dissertation SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA BY Ursula M. Dalinghaus IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY Professor Karen Z. Ho, Ph.D. Advisor January 2014 © Ursula Monika Dalinghaus 2014 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This dissertation has only been possible through the support of many people in Germany and the United States. I am especially grateful to the specialists at the Deutsche Bundesbank in Frankfurt am Main and Leipzig, who graciously permitted me to conduct my research alongside their communications work with the public, and who offered their time for interviews and questions throughout the research process. I also extend my thanks to institutions in Leipzig, including Archiv Bürgerbewegung Leipzig, e.V.; Europa Haus Leipzig, and Zeitgeschichtliches Forum Leipzig-Stiftung Haus der Geschichte. I take full responsibility for any errors, omissions and mistranslations in this dissertation. I am grateful for the feedback and suggestions of research participants and committee members throughout this process of analysis, writing and representation. I would like to express my deepest and heartfelt gratitude to my doctoral committee. My advisor, Karen Ho, has inspired, challenged, pushed and cheered me on through every moment of this project with patience and tenacity. She has encouraged me throughout this project to speak to the problem-spaces of my ethnographic research and to develop my analytical voice. I trust that her tireless mentorship will continue to make its mark apparent in my professional life and writing. The chair of my committee, Stuart Mclean, has taught me about the importance of creativity and storytelling at the heart of the anthropological endeavor. If I have departed too much from the normative demands of empiricism in this project then it is out of the shared conviction that stories participate in the world and can re-make worlds. Over these many years of graduate school and i research, Hoon Song has shown me what it means to be a teacher and a scholar. He has helped me through many impasses in my thinking and exemplified how philosophy and theory should inform our ethnographic and analytical commitments. I have many more miles to go in living up to that teaching. Matthias Rothe has shown a trust in me that I have not deserved, but for which I am deeply thankful. Where I have struggled with the politics of this research, he has urged me to think of my own positionality. This version of my project is another step in that direction. I also want to thank Thomas Wolfe for his contributions to my training and preparation for the field, and the many office hours spent listening to me connect the endless threads running through my project. I remember like yesterday the phone call I received from Tom and Daphne Berdahl urging me to come to the University of Minnesota. Daphne’s work and writings on East Germany are a legacy and testament to her deep insights about post-1989 Germany. I have felt Daphne’s absence throughout my fieldwork and writing. She is sorely missed. I would also like to acknowledge the support, input and intellectual mentorship at different stages of my research from William Beeman, Michael Goldman, Gloria Goodwin Raheja, Stephen Gudeman, Jean Langford, Karen-Sue Taussig, David Valentine and Barbara Wolbert. Research for this dissertation was supported by an NSF Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grant, a University of Minnesota Graduate School Thesis Grant, a University of Minnesota Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship, a Hella Mears Summer Graduate Fellowship, and grants and fellowships from the DAAD, Center for German ii and European Studies at the University of Minnesota, and the Department of Anthropology at the University of Minnesota. Many friends and colleagues have contributed to and seen me through the heights and the depths of this process: Naheed Aaftaab, Murat Altun, John Baldwin, Eric Bangs, Solveig Brown, Matthew Carlson, Avigdor Edminster, Heather Flowers, Jen Hughes, Jennifer Immich, Sa’ra Kaiser, Claire Kirchhoff, Rebecca Kocos, Karen Kapusta-Pofahl, Steven Kensinger, Namrata Gaikwad, Ritika Ganguly, Timothy Gitzen, the Hoffmann’s, Michael Keller, Monika and Klaus Keller, Damon Lynch, Meryl Lodge, Laura McLeod, Laurie Moberg, Ashley Olstad, Lorë Phillips, Amirpouan Shiva, Sharon Smith, Jennifer Stampe, Mai See Thao, Constance Timm, Tracy Zank, Jianfeng Zhu. If there is anyone I have overlooked here, please accept my apologies. I also want to thank Kara Kersteter, Barbara London, Terri Valois, Barbara Murdock, and Amy Nordlander for their tireless efforts on my behalf. There are many people I have not been able to thank by name. Please know my debt of gratitude for making this project possible in the fist place. I thank my extended family in Germany, most especially: Dirk Nordhaus and Elisabeth Dalinghaus-Nordhaus, Josef and Leni Dalinghaus, and Bernd and Annette Dalinghaus for their welcoming support during my research stays in Germany and many hours of laughter and consultation at the kitchen table in Bahlen. Lastly, I want to thank my parents Franz and Diane Dalinghaus, my sister Martina, and my brother Thomas, for all their support and patience over these many years. To my niece, Angie (Angeliki): may iii you strive toward your full creative heights (and forgive the many hours, days and years we have missed spending together because I have been consumed by this dissertation) iv Dedication For Daphne Berdahl and Diane Dalinghaus and Angeliki Niteros v ABSTRACT This dissertation traces the socio-economic problem spaces and afterlives of the 1990 currency and economic union between West and East Germany, and the parallel process of creating the European single currency. Based on two and half years of full-time multi- sited (geographically and institutionally) fieldwork in Frankfurt am Main (West) and Leipzig (East) Germany, I show the pragmatic challenges of defining, enacting, and materializing relations of solidarity and obligation through new forms of monetary relations. I argue that the long and fraught histories of harmonizing east and west German regions offer critical insights for analyzing the new fault lines emerging between ‘core’ and ‘periphery’ nations in the euro-zone. My project therefore makes a contribution in narrating currency unions as emergent technical and social relationships, through which expert and lay understandings about money and economy are unwound and remade over time. In pursuing this line of inquiry, a key focus of my research included participatory research on the communications work of the German Central Bank (Deutsche Bundesbank) in Frankfurt am Main and Leipzig. vi TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS……………………………………………………………….i DEDICATION…………………………………………………………………………….v ABSTRACT……………………………………………………………………………...vi LIST OF FIGURES…………………………………………………………………….................viii CHAPTER 1: Introduction…………………………………………………………………….…1 CHAPTER 2: Re-membering stable money in the age of the euro……………………………..31 CHAPTER 3: ‘Distant Europe, tangible euro?’ Making sense of interconnections in the EU’...84 CHAPTER 4: Shared narratives of critique, different forms of accounting: the 1990 currency union in east/west perspective………………………………………………… 169 CHAPTER 5: An (un)timely affair: on money, power and belonging………...………………219 CHAPTER 6 From divided state to ‘new’ regions: on value, place, and ‘catching up’.……...258 CHAPTER 7: Re-reading the socialism/capitalism divide: Currency unions and the circulation of economic alternatives in Germany…………………………………………295 CHAPTER 8: Conclusion: On being untimely: Accounting for Europe’s remainders ………..317 BIBLIOGRAPHY………………………………………………………………………336 vii LIST OF FIGURES Figure 1. Carnival parade in Leipzig: ‘ironic commentary on the sale of the public works’…….126 Figure 2: Carnival parade in Leipzig: ‘the mayor will clean house with the sale’………………..127 Figure 3. Dublin, Ireland: Lisbon Treaty Referendum. ‘No to the reform treaty’………………..142 Figure 4. “Congratulations Ireland”………………………………………………………...……143 Figure 5. “The New EU won’t see you, hear you, speak for you”……………………………….144 Figure 6. “Lisbon Treaty. Get the complete picture”…………………………………………….145 Figure 7. “People Died for your Freedom”…………………………………………………….…147 Figure 8. “Stop EU Super-Government”…………………………………………………………148 Figure 9. “Vote Yes for jobs, the economy, and Ireland’s future”…………………………….....150 Figure 10. “Europe. Let’s Be at the Heart of It”…………………………………………….….….151 Figure 11. “Don’t Be Bullied”……………………………………………………...……………..158 Figure 12. “Let’s Make Europe Work Better”……………………………………………………..168 viii Chapter 1: Introduction “The question is not whether to remember or to forget, but what to remember and to forget, when and in what context”(Grosz 2004) In 2008 I met with Herr Schultz at his apartment in Leipzig-Gohlis, (former East Germany). Herr Schultz was speaking about the euro long before the beginnings of the present euro crisis (2013 at the time of this writing). Yet his articulate analysis by now resonates within multiple temporalities of currency shifts and economic crisis. Schultz worked as underground engineer drilling natural gas in the GDR. He wanted to study at university. He was not allowed to do so because his father had been a private businessman (long into the socialist period). As Herr Schultz noted ironically, I was labeled a “capitalist” child. He became a small-business entrepreneur himself after unification, opening