Material Fantasies

De verwachtingen waren hoogespannen, de Berlijnse muur was gevallen en een veilige oversteek naar het welgestelde West-Duitsland was een feit. Welvaart en materialisme behoorden voor Oost-Duitsers nu tot de mogelijkheden. Waarom waren Oost-Duitsers bereid in het Westen veel meer te betalen voor goederen en levensmiddelen? Dit onderzoek naar het snel veranderende Oost-Duitsland na de val van de muur, gaat in op deze verwachtingen. Veenis analyseert de relatie tussen de fantasie van het bezitten van spullen, persoonlijke prestatie en de sociale cohesie.

Milena Veenis doceert Antropologie aan de Universiteit van Amsterdam.

English

This informative study of East German fantasies of material abundance across the border, both before and after the fall of communism, shows the close and intricate relationship between ideology and fantasy in upholding social life. In 1989, news broadcasts all over the world were dominated for weeks by images of East Germans crossing the Berlin Wall to West Germany. The images, representing the fall of communism and the democratic will of the people, also showed the East Germans; excitement at finally being able to enter the Western consumer paradise. But what exactly had they expected to find on the other side of the Wall? Why did they shed tears of joy when for the first time in their lives, they stepped inside West German shops? And why were they prepared to pay more than 10 per cent of their average monthly wage for a pineapple?

Drawing on fifteen months of research in the fast-changing post-communist East Germany, Veenis unravels the perennial truths about the interrelationships of fantasies of material wealth, personal fulfillment and social cohesion. She argues persuasively that the far-fetched socialist and capitalist promises of consumption as the road to the ultimate well-being, the partial realization and partial corruption thereof, the implicit social and psychological interests underlying the politicized promises in both countries form the breeding ground for the development of materialist, cargo-cult-like fantasies, in which material well-being came to be seen as the place of fulfillment and ultimate arrival.

Milena Veenis lectures in anthropology at the University of Amsterdam.